Her brother’s obstinate refusal to come to grips with the Common Tongue was going to be a complication…. But that was all right. Helen would be directing him, and there was nothing wrong with keeping Miss Alien-in-disguise off balance. She would not let herself feel hurt that Misha had found a replacement for his old companion. It was necessary for the plot. She watched, frame by frame, immersed in the game that she had devised: a sick child, bored and lonely, deploying her toy armies across the counterpane.
3
The Phoenix Café
i
There were four fatal casualties during the police action at the Renaissance meeting: a small figure, but embarrassing. Bhairava killed himself the next day as an apology for his misjudgment. Everyone knew this was a deliberate snub directed at the City Manager, but Bhairava had planned his escape well. Sattva, though he fumed, couldn’t call it suicide. The house at the Giratoire was plunged into mourning. Maitri spent hours in the character shrine communing with his dear friend and sometimes lover; and everyone in the household felt the loss.
Catherine made no attempt to contact Misha. She waited, as a young lady should, passive as Thérèse Khan in the high-walled orchard, to see what would happen next. She spent a lot of time in her room, alone. Since she’d seen Misha Connelly’s flowers, she had felt, or imagined she felt, something stirring in the part of herself that had been empty, dry and broken for so long.
She woke one day, mid-morning, from a drowse of half-formed ideas, and found someone at her door. It was Misha, dressed as before, in a loose light coat over local-grown overalls. The coat was blue and the dun suit under it had a fine blue pattern moving in the fabric. He seemed nonplussed by the membrane, scarcely more than a foggy thickening of the air, that stood in place of an Old Earth style solid barrier. These days humans rarely visited Aleutian private rooms.
“Walk through it,” she told him, “It won’t hurt you.”
“I did call. This morning. Lord Maitri said you’d like to see me. One of the secretaries—Vijaya?—had me brought up here.”
Catherine had been letting Maitri take all her calls since she came back to the Giratoire: she was afraid of the Church of Self. She hated the idea of being ambushed by the virtual ghost of that halfcaste deacon. Misha stepped over his commensal escort, which was weaving around his ankles hoping to be petted. He stared frankly at the cluttered array of devotional pictures and movie-loops.
“I would have called before, but I was uncertain of my welcome after the massacre,” he declared grandly.
Catherine held out her arms. The little servant jumped into her lap, nuzzled her throat, and clambered over her shoulder to get at the wall, where it started to nibble at a crack in the plaster. Its default purpose in life was to keep things looking nice and decayed.
“Why should that have made you unwelcome? It wasn’t your fault.”
“I wonder why the police chief killed himself over something so minor. Four pathetic humans; not much of a body-count.”
“Bhairava doesn’t believe in permanent death,” said Catherine quietly, “It’s beyond his imagination. He wanted an excuse to leave Earth, but he wouldn’t have allowed anyone to be murdered.” She realized she was crouching on her bed, in a pose that was too Aleutian. She rearranged herself. “At least it ended the quarrel between him and Maitri. That’s one good thing.”
Misha glance at his divinity, sidelong. How strange they were about death! He couldn’t believe he’d been lead into her bedroom. He wondered if it was a trap. Lord Maitri was about to leap from a closet, outraged at this invasion of his ward’s modesty, and demand the non-permanent death penalty. Out of bravado he took down a slim volume and began to leaf through it: The Life of a Soul.
Thérèse of Lisieux, how intriguing—
Her heroic virtue was exercised in such ordinary ways that it was not easily recognizable…. Likening her life to a glass of medicine, beautiful to behold but bitter to taste, she went on to say that this bitterness had not made her life sad because she had learned to find joy and sweetness in bitter things. “It has come to this,” she said, “that I can no longer suffer, because all suffering is sweet.”
He laughed.
“What is it?”
“I was thinking of our own Little Flower. You’ve met her: Thérèse Khan.” He was gratified at her surprise. “We all know each other. It’s almost Aleutian, the way we know each other. Youro is huge, but the inner circle is tiny.”
The litter on the table under her bookshelf included oil pastels, pencils and paper; styli for graphic screens that had been obsolete before the aliens arrived; an Aleutian sketchpad; a quill pen (never cut) a Japanese inkstone in a lacquered case, a glass Virgin full of sand, a bird’s nest (beautifully recreated by some Aleutian artisan) containing three ovoid pebbles of blue, white and marbled grey. A model airplane, hologram holy pictures; a scatter of unset precious stones; a Hand of Fatima cut from ancient printed circuit-wafer, its complexity blended into a pearly moiré; rigid amber silk.
“Is this your souvenir collection? It’s rather disappointing. After three hundred years of looting I’d have expected more of a haul.”
“I wasn’t around for the whole three hundred years. Anyway, I keep the real stuff in my bank vault.” She saw that he believed this, and laughed. “No! I got rid of my hoard. It embarrassed me.”
He had found a Pre-Contact canvas, propped unframed on an easel against the wall. The scene was a Nativity, the symbolic birth set among ruins, a favorite theme of the original Youro Renaissance. Renewal was held in the disintegrating womb of the past; the sacred child surrounded by a chaos of broken columns, refractory camels, investigative journalists, toppling palm trees, mad astrologers.
“I like this. Who’s it by?”
“Someone called Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Is that so? A copy, I suppose.” He touched the picture: it was solid.
“It’s original, so far as I’m aware.” She shrugged and smiled. “It’s loot, you’re quite right. I’m weak and greedy and I couldn’t part with my Leonardo.”
“My, my. Leonardo da Vinci. And you don’t know if it’s real. You should let me find out for you, I can do that.” He whipped a small machine from his pocket. “Nothing invasive, a photochemical scan—” The thing had done whatever it did before she had a chance to protest; or to explain that the picture’s provenance was actually impeccable.
Irony, she decided, had best be avoided.
“I’ll let you know.” He put his gadget away. “But I came to ask you out. I thought I could show you some sites, places you probably haven’t seen. We could eat Old Earth style. We might eventually meet those brutes who were with me at the meeting, but I’ll protect you from their coarse humor. In short, I’m offering to be your native guide. Lord Maitri approves.” He beamed at her: ingenuous, eager. “Do you accept?”
He went to wait in the atrium. Catherine put on a robe, the same smoky violet she’d worn to the Renaissance meeting (it was a sturdy garment, meant to last a season); and boots. He had a demicab waiting at the front of the house, “demi,” meaning there were two separate soft compartments. Catherine rode behind, peering through the flawed gel of the windows, where the effluvium of the city air was constantly gathering, constantly being dismantled and dispersed. It was like looking through moss agate.
“Do you know the quartier well?” demanded Misha, from the front seat.
She knew the premises of the Church of Self. Her congregation’s cramped, sweaty rooms; an estate of packed tenements; a police station; Maitri’s house. “I don’t know it at all.”
“I’ll take you to the Car Park.”
He stopped the cab about halfway between the Giratoire and the local commercial center. The pavements were full of people, the roadway full of bicycles, cabs and buses; the occasional private car. In the distance a lumbering aircraft crawled above the rooftops, delivering bulky goods or carrying humble passengers to some other part of Youro. Shop-front plate glass,
which had never reappeared after the War, had been replaced by sheets of a hybrid membrane that ate dirt and turned it into color. The shops themselves were living space. Bodies swam and faces looked out through cat’s-eye, garnet, carnelian, ruby: humans living as they imagined Aleutians lived—in public, without walls.
“A lot of people hate the bit-grid city,” declared Misha, “They want to strip it out. That’s the way Lalith feels. So does my father, an embarrassing ally for her I would have thought. Agreed, the grid is appallingly badly managed. There’s untold dross, staggering quantities of obsolete public information; and who buys these products? We live like Aleutians these days. We’re peasants. We feed and clothe and furnish our own households. We only buy commissioned works like my Vlab, luxury items. We stick our surplus production in a vente directe booth, and gain little more than status when it empties. Most of the products you’ll see advertised in the publicité hoardings don’t exist, did you know that? Try to get hold of those multifarious brands of soap and socks: you’ll soon find out. Pub is imaginary, fossilized ephemera. It’s a pathetic survival. But we want it to stay because it’s our raw material, our creative medium.”
He stopped, hands in his overall pockets, the blue coat pushed back from his hips in artful disarray. The hurrying crowds parted round them. “This is one of my favorite sites. We call this eaufort, etching. I don’t know who did it; a lot of grid art is anonymous.”
The “site” was an area of smart surface that had been rented out to many different customers, successively and simultaneously. Nothing had ever been completely erased. The moving images standing in the air ran into each other, layered like sheets of living cells, incomprehensible but full of information: a cruel experience for the visual cortex. Random coherence rose up and vanished: a human eye, a moving wheel, a huge shape that looked like a grieving skull.
“In eaufort the art is in the data. You don’t put it there: you find it there. Like Michelangelo Buonarotti—you’ve heard of him?—freeing human bodies from marble.”
“Thank the Self they’re not allowed soundtrack,” said Catherine.
Michael stepped into the site’s footprint and tipped his head back, taking the pounding waterfall of the unreal full in his face. “You’ve never been anywhere that’s licensed for sound? It’s much worse. An experience you mustn’t miss.”
He led her on. “Why do you walk?” asked Catherine. “I noticed, the other night. It means something to you Renaissance people. You and your friends ordered a cab for my sake. But you made a joke of it; you didn’t want to use it.”
Misha halted, “Are you tired?”
“No!”
“Good,” He strode on. “The cabs are alive.”
“But not Aleutian! Bred and grown entirely by humans—!”
“They have hybrid genes. That’s not the point. We don’t agree with Lalith. We don’t want to develop life sciences. In our view that’s not the Renaissance. I use my Vlab to make illusions, I don’t build synthetic biologies: what’s the point, Aleutians do that stuff better. We believe in void forces and machines. Have you come across the expression: Animals have life: machines have soul?”
“Er…no.”
“It was the motif of the eaufort I just showed you. Never mind.”
“You don’t like living technology, so you walk. On your biological legs.”
He grinned. “So laugh. You are the lords of life, we are the living. Your superiority is inescapable. Anything we do to reclaim our separate identity is absurd. We don’t care.”
He seemed to have forgotten about the Car Park: he had the air of a careless flâneur, wandering at whim. But Catherine detected a growing, tense anxiety. It crossed her mind that this might, after all, be an anti-Aleutian terrorist plot: an abduction attempt. They reached a complex junction. The ancient buildings around it were naked of projections. Probably they were famous and under a preservation order, but they looked skinned alive and rejected. Only the cowl of a maglev station in the center of the naked place was awash with moving color.
“You don’t know how to use the lev. That’s one of the things I’ll show you. However, you mustn’t use it alone.” People were pouring in and out of the arched entrance; cabs and minibuses nosed each other outside, disgorging travelers. Misha started walking round the cowl. “Young ladies don’t, of course, nor do ordinary females if they can help it. Even dressed as you are you’d have trouble, and the chador only makes it worse.”
He stopped in the viewpoint of a projection, a single-layered cheap image: low rez and detail poor. A gigantic Traditionalist woman with dark hair and unnaturally pale skin stood on a seashore. Her hair fell in chunky masses over white draperies. Waves crashed at her feet as she went through her classic, touching routine: buy this and be beautiful like me. She should have been holding some kind of skin-bleach or exfoliate.
“Oh, thank you Lord,” breathed Misha, quietly exultant. “Thank you, Jesus! Whooee!”
The coral branch lay in the woman’s white palm: glowing, extraordinary, an intrusion from a different order of creation. Misha touched Catherine’s arm, shifting her position slightly. A husky, drawling female voice murmured, from nowhere, “a branch of cold flame.”
She was genuinely thrilled. “You did it! What’s the response?”
He affected unconcern, while continuing to gaze at his work in adoration. “I don’t really know. It’s getting some notice, here and there. I don’t keep track.”
He would clearly have been happy to stand there all day, but managed to remember his responsibility as the young lady’s guide. “Good, we can eat now. You must be starving. The Car Park isn’t far.”
They passed into one of the neighborhood’s small stretches of cropland: bean fields in indigo leaf and flower that gave off fumes of sweet scent. It was cooler at once. The Aleutians were untroubled by the helplessness of their own elite, but they’d been unable to tolerate the idea of commoners who could not feed themselves: hence every inhabitant of an Aleutian city must have a piece of earth, if it was no bigger than a windowbox; besides the major areas of food-plant, threaded through the City’s ecology. This was a big shared patch, a farming co-operative. Tenement towers surrounded it, curled and crooked and indefinitely various. A massive block stood ahead, where their unpaved track re-entered the streets—swathes of naked concrete appearing and disappearing through its flickering layers of colored décor.
“The Car Park,” announced Misha. “I know you’ll love this.”
It was a food market, spread over several floors of huge, dank, low-ceilinged halls; connected by massive poured-stone ramps and stairways. Every floor teemed with booths, counters and lunching citizens, and every stall seemed to offered dishes as ancient as those Leonie recreated: a wonderful, ideal vision of Old Earth.
“What’ll it be?” asked Misha, smug with success. “Potage bonne femme? A little lobster bisque? What about a pizza? Let’s cruise. See what’s new.”
So they cruised, collecting snow-pea lasagna with insect protein, (You’re not a vegetarian are you? asked Misha); a rice dish with starfruit; beanbread, a confection called carracara flan, with carrots, caramel and tofu sauce…. Ionized ground water and a flask of rose sherbert. The customers, poor or not so poor, were antique and various as the cuisine. Many wore cut and sewn fabric, not as a revolutionary gesture but because they knew nothing else. Misha chaffed with the stallholders, both in-person and virtual. Balancing cartons, Catherine looked for somewhere to sit down. The tables, packed with enthusiastic lunchers, looked as interesting as the food.
“Sorry, no. We don’t eat in. The food is shareware when it’s new to the menus; that’s a Car Park tradition. It gets a price when you go back for more. But if you sit down, you always have to pay.”
Outdoors, they found a spot among other frugal patrons on the steps of a fine modern pantheist temple, decorated with scenes from the lives of Sts Rama, Guru Nanak, Louis and Genéviève. It was hosting a rousing midday service.
; “I’ve never been convinced by starfruit,” remarked Misha. “An interesting idea, but too clever. I don’t know who did them, they’ve been around forever.”
“God, I believe.”
“Really? I never knew that.”
There seemed to be a vogue for black-and-white movie clips in savory packaging. Tiny invasive messages crawled through Lauren Bacall’s coiffure. Humphrey Bogart exhaled twenty-fourth century graffiti. Catherine tore up her empty bowls and ate them: chewing fly-posting, high art, and vandalism in digestible cellulose. Few other lunchers, she noticed, observed this virtuous ritual.
“When we arrived, to drop litter was a bleak gesture of alienation. At least that’s changed. All trash is compost! Why is it important not to pay? You’re rich.”
“I don’t carry cash. Anyway the nitrogen-fixing grub-mulch we just trialed is an experiment. I like that aspect. I like being ahead of the game.”
“I see. It used to be called ligging.”
“Hmm?”
“Ligging. Freeloading as an artform, a fashion statement. We were terrific liggers. We never paid for a thing, once we understood the rules. Bother, I ate my spoon. One can take instant recycling too far…. Oh, it’s all right, this’ll do.” The pudding came in plain industrial red and brown. She unearthed someone else’s discarded fork from a drift of debris, licked it and dug into her flan. Misha watched, slightly horrified.
“Maybe you really are an Aleutian.”
“What? Why not? I have very tough bugs in my gut: same as you. And I am an Aleutian, no matter what you think of my bio-chemical provenance. Remember Sidney Carton? Race is bullshit, culture is everything?”
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