“This is what you call poetry?”
“It’s your nearest analogue to our poetry. The only use we have for printed words in Aleutia is in instruction manuals. Art made in that medium would be like—um, asking your average human audience to admire a page of mathematical symbols. People do it from time to time, it’s done. Not by me.”
“You do representational pictures. Aleutian Renoirs? Narratives?”
“I don’t look for a subject. I draw what’s in front of me, usually. I try to capture a moment. Is that banal enough? But an Aleutian poem is…it’s alive. How can I explain? When an Aleutian takes a wanderer from his skin, and feeds it to a friend, he’s saying this is me now, this is my state of being. When I compose a poem I’m trying to do that to the world, through the microcosm of what I see. This is the world, now. When another Aleutian comes along, maybe generations later, and ‘looks at my picture,’ the meaning of that moment to me is shed from the picture and enters the viewer. The poem is a communication-loop. Captured: and released again, not the same but evolved by everything that’s happened since, brought into being by my poem’s meeting with the new gaze. I’m not explaining this well. If I could say what I mean by making a poem in Spoken Words, it wouldn’t be poetry.”
She stared at Les Parapluies: the flower-faces standing out like love stories in the sober, cynical text of Renoir’s narrative. Virtual particles of the dead artist’s intention filled her air, entered her being.
“I’m wrong. It is the same.”
She felt the touch of Misha’s sleeve against her own through her whole body, and did not attempt to filter out her knowledge that he had the same awareness; that for both of them this intellectual conversation was exquisitely, secretly erotic.
Misha applied his utility test. “But do you do it for profit?”
“Absolutely. Personal profit for me. Does that count?”
A security guard had found them. It sneaked up, apparently fascinated by the sight of the young lady and her escort, and hovered. Misha glanced around, with a forbidding glare. It stood its ground.
“It’s no wonder nobody comes here,” said Misha, loudly. “Who wants to see this stuff? Babies and breasts, dead bodies, movie-moments of corporate confirmation. You’ll have noticed there’s death and sex and violence in hideous quantities, but if there’s an image of someone shitting anywhere, I missed it. That’s one of the least celebrated pleasures in life if you ask me, the feel of a lovely big fat turd plopping out of you. What’s art if it doesn’t venerate pleasure?”
“I prefer to ooze,” reflected Catherine. “I learned to shit your dreadful bricks in my first life here, same time as I learned to eat your weird food. We don’t do lumps. We don’t always use nappies. It was only on the shipworld that we took to toilet pads. But I like them. Oozing into a pad is the best. I like to seep, to feel it going while I’m talking to someone, or walking down the street. I like the way it vanishes into your pad. You produce, but what you produce immediately becomes part of the world again.”
“It must be like the trickle of menstrual blood. Do you menstruate?”
The guard had begun to show mechanical signs of embarrassment early in Misha’s speech. It fidgeted on the spot, roused a detector vane or two; retracted an appendage. Finally, torn between prudery and censorious suspicion, it scooted off backwards and careered out of sight, still ogling with every sensor.
Misha and Catherine burst into giggles.
“Ah, les rosbifs. Who says there’s no such thing as ethnic identity?”
“No I don’t,” she said. “I know your fancy young ladies still bleed, but ordinary women don’t. I didn’t want to be special.”
He flushed crimson. “Self, I didn’t really mean you to answer that.” He quickly recovered. “For completism, maybe you should. It’s classically female. Are you fertile?”
“Subfertile, your quacks say. Same as always. I am myself, translated.”
They came up into the forecourt. A row of cabs stood under leaden clouds, on a field of alien weeds above the culverted river. The brilliant blur of a commercial zone stood beyond: debased remains transmuted by distance into shafts of dancing aurora, phalanxes of multi-colored angels running up and down between earth and sky. It was the last day of their trip. They went to the Expedition car that was waiting for her.
“Come back with me,” she said, not wanting to say goodbye. She scratched the rubbery creases around the vehicle’s sleepy, daylight eyes. “Come back to the Embassy, stay the night. You shouldn’t pass up a chance to spend an Aleutian night. We can travel together in the morning.”
They would travel together, alone in a closed car. It would be scandalous, unforgivable, if Catherine was a real young lady. But she was not. She was wearing these clothes for a whim; she belonged to no one but herself. Of course Misha understood that. She would tell him how peculiar and perilous it felt to have no underwear. They would laugh about it. They would escape from their roles: she from her need for punishment, he from his secret anger. They would be friends, be good to each other, make love, enjoy—
“No thanks,” he said. “Vive la Renaissance. No belly of the beast for me. I’ll use the lev.”
Misha left the Tate forecourt by an underpass. The twenty-fourth century vanished into dank archaeological gloom. There were cities under cities in western fringes of Youro, dead things layered in the dark. Strips of bacterial lighting, crawling with minitel information, directed him to his station; the only fragments of the present day. He checked his tally of how many times she had said “always,” and how many times she said “we.” It helped him to keep his distance. As he passed a buried shop front, stepped on and trampled by the clambering generations, a sexless, haggard face looked up from a beggar’s pitch. The troglodyte thrust out a filthy palm.
Misha halted, obeying an impulse of petty malice. “You think you’d like to change places with me, don’t you.”
The beggar grinned and nodded, now sure of a generous handout.
“You’re wrong.”
He strode on.
iii
Misha told Joset something he could have told him a while before. The Leonardo da Vinci in Miss Catherine’s boudoir was the real thing. Although, of course, totally inferior to an analogous Aleutian artwork, as it didn’t give off information-rich whiffs of sixteenth-century pheromones. The others had either long been convinced that Catherine was the one they sought (Mâtho, Rajath, Lydie); or remained skeptical, but wanted to get on with the plot (Agathe, Lalith, Thérèse, Imran). Commence phase three.
Misha came to fetch Catherine as usual, and they took a cab to the Phoenix Café. She knew as soon as she walked in that she was in some kind of trouble. The cadre was unusually united: Rajath, Mâtho and Lydie, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, her brother; Lalith. Shortly after Misha and Catherine came in they were joined by Thérèse and Imran Khan. It was evening twilight, the traditional human gathering time. The café was crowded. The regulars were used to seeing Lord Maitri’s ward by now. Lalith attracted more attention: public interest in the Renaissance was growing. But this evening nobody came over to try and introduce themselves, no would-be acquaintances casually dropped by. The group of friends had an atmosphere. Unusually, there was no food or wine on the table. It was Rosh Hashanah, they explained to Catherine, the Jewish New Year. The citizens of Youro enjoyed the holidays of all the various cults, if they happened to be employed: or observed the rituals (as far as they were remembered), if they happened to be believers.
“What are we supposed to eat?” demanded Lydie. “I’m hungry.”
“Black letter print with sanserif sauce?” suggested Agathe. “Newsprint paté? The Jews are the People of the Book, aren’t they?”
“Nah,” grinned Joset. “Turtle soup with pigs’ trotters, followed by dairy ice cream.”
Mâtho, the authority, was ordered to pronounce, but he refused to be drawn. “It isn’t really Rosh Hashanah,” he told Catherine. “It isn’t even Yom Kippur. Youro celebrat
es everything on the wrong dates, because of the calendar change in—”
She was not allowed to listen. Her second mood-piece had just been released by the agency, and everyone wanted to congratulate her. “There’s one thing about this video diary,” remarked Joset, “that’s puzzling, Miss Catherine. The ‘Aleutian-speaking’ commentary software picked up your name.”
“Let’s get some wine,” said Misha.
“It turns out they call you Pure One, around the house. Is that a common name? Or are you the famous Pure One: Clavel the Third Captain?”
So that was it. She sighed, relieved. “No,” she said. “I mean, no it’s not a common name; and yes, I’m Clavel. It’s not a secret. I’m Clavel.”
Joset opened his eyes wide. “Wow! We are sitting here with one of the three original leaders of the Expedition to Earth?”
She knew (she couldn’t filter out everything!) that they’d always known who she was supposed to be. Most of all Misha, whose goading had always been right on target! She didn’t care whether or not they believed she was Clavel. She’d only prayed they would feel it was “cooler” not to refer openly to her past history. She’d been asking too much. Wine arrived. The young humans, maybe nonplussed by her unhappy silence, were silent in turn, staring at Catherine or the tabletop, in degrees of curiosity and embarrassment
She began, “But you always—” (Misha smiled coldly.)
She tried again. “All right. I am the person the Aleutians call Pure One, translated into a human body. That’s who I learned to be, the way an Aleutian child learns. That’s ‘who I am’ in the physical entity of the Brood, and in the Commonalty of Aleutia. But I’m not in charge now! It’s a long time, lives, since I was a leader of the Expedition.”
“You’re still a really important person,” insisted Lydie.
On a scale of what? She found it hard to face the dancer’s eyes.
“Even when I was the Third Captain, I wasn’t very important, Lydie. We’d been lost forever, we were bored. The Expedition was a private venture. We were stir-crazy wastrels. I certainly didn’t have an idea that Aleutia would end up ruling this world, and I’ve never been remotely interested in that as a plan.”
The humans looked at each other.
“Is it t-t-true that you raped him?” blurted Mâtho. “J-Johnny Guglioli the journalist?”
“Yes.”
She lifted her glass and drank, to fill the silence.
“I don’t know why people make such a fuss about that,” exclaimed Lydie, loyally. “What’s so terrible about one little rape?”
“It caused the Sabotage Crisis, Lydie,” muttered Imran, scowling.
“I don’t see that! Johnny Guglioli got raped; he didn’t have to join the terrorists. He didn’t have to hijack the Buonarotti device, and try to commit genocide. He could have turned Braemar Wilson over to the authorities. Self! What if everybody who had sex forced on them thought they were entitled to kill millions of people in revenge?”
She blushed, her thick, big-pored halfcaste skin flaring suddenly dark.
Agathe touched Catherine’s hand. “I’m named after Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was assassinated in an early phase of the Gender War; the first female Prime Minister in modern Africa. It’s the custom in my party to take the names of Reformer martyrs, people who have borne witness to our beliefs in their lives or by their deaths. Our saints, if you like. We got the idea from the halfcastes, who took it from the Aleutians. I don’t believe in reincarnation, certainly not for humans. I do believe Agathe Uwilingiyimana lives on in me. I’ve learned from your Aleutian perception of God. We are all aspects of the WorldSelf. We are part of each other. If she was guilty, I share her guilt, if she had burdens to bear, I share them too. We are all guilty, all burdened, and all forgiven. It doesn’t mean that I am that dead woman. I am myself.”
“It’s just a name,” said Rajath, puncturing the Reformer’s solemnity. “My parents aren’t believers. They sent me to the Church of Self to learn ‘speaking Aleutian’ and I didn’t. They keep up the halfcastes stuff out of habit. Being called ‘Rajath’ doesn’t mean a thing to me. If the First Captain owes anyone anything, they can forget it, far as I’m concerned!”
Agathe batted him down with a gesture, watching Catherine. “To us you are Catherine, a human being. In our company you can be yourself.”
Misha rapped on a wine glass.
“I declare a press conference,” he announced. “As Miss Catherine’s manager, I’ll keep order. The alien in human disguise, formerly known as Clavel, will take your questions.”
The mood lightened, to Catherine’s relief. Agathe looked annoyed, but she didn’t protest.
“Don’t ask me about the Departure. I won’t answer anything about that. Sattva would have my throat.”
“That’s fine. We’re sublimely uninterested in your leaving plans. Lydie?”
“What’s the real name of your planet?” cried the dancer.
“Home.”
Lydie pulled a face. “That’s what you guys always say. What is it really?”
“Home!” repeated Catherine, laughing. “Why not? It’s better than ‘dirt.’”
“What’s the identity of your home system’s star?” asked Imran sharply.
“What do we call it at home? The sun, I suppose, more or less.”
Imran frowned, but Lalith broke in before he could pursue the point.
“What’s the real name of your people, nation, Brood, whatever?”
“Aleutians.”
“Oh, come on! That’s a chain of islands off the coast of Alaska, where one of your landing parties touched down. I mean your own name for yourselves.”
For a moment nothing happened. Someone giggled.
“She told us in the Common Tongue,” guessed Lydie. “We didn’t get it.”
Imran had been thinking. “I’ve got a good one—”
“You’ve had your turn,” protested Joset.
“But she didn’t answer mine, and this asks why.”
“Let him, let him,” came a chorus of voices.
“Why have you people never used your own formal language on Earth?”
“Our articulate languages are extremely fluid and contextual,” explained Catherine, plausibly. “People change their spoken names, and the names for things, constantly, as seems appropriate. In the context of the Expedition to Earth, English is our formal language.” She laughed. “That’s the party line. Be reasonable: I’m a trader, we’re a trading nation. If people learn your spoken language, your formal system of signs, it’s going to give them a bargaining advantage. To retain control in a trading situation, you speak the other people’s language and manage it so they don’t learn yours. I don’t know if it works, but that’s what we believe. I seem to have observed humans operating the same way,” she added. “If they get the chance.”
She felt their recoil: she’d offended them. She should not joke about the how the aliens had manipulated the humans. It wasn’t funny.
“So will you say something for us now, in the Aleutian formal language?”
“No.”
Misha laughed. “Does that mean no?”
She grinned. “Yes.”
“She’s an Aleutian,” muttered Imran. “They don’t break ranks.”
“What do you think of the way humans in the Enclaves all ‘call themselves she’ these days? Is it the Aleutian policy to encourage that?”
This was a difficult issue, and it would get the party line, with no joking. “It’s true that locals in the Enclaves tend to think of themselves as human first and male or female second, these days. But the ‘she’ aspect is physiological fact, or so we have been led to believe. Women, bearing breasts, is the definition of the kind of animal humans are, isn’t it? Hence the expression…mammals?”
She should have known the official line would be a disaster. Now everyone was deeply offended. Except, presumably, Agathe and Lalith. But they were keeping their thoughts to themselves.
&nbs
p; “Whose side are you on,” asked Thérèse slowly, “Traditionalists or Reformers?”
“Don’t be stupid,” shouted Lydie, “you can’t ask her that.”
“She can,” countered Catherine. “But you know the answer. I’m not on either side. That’s not policy, it’s the truth. I was here in the War. I don’t care if you believe that or not, to me it’s true. I remember the War. There were no ‘good guys’ once the weapons were out. There never are. And there are no Gender warriors who are good guys now.”
“She’s right,” said Agathe abruptly. “We’ve put gender violence behind us. Isn’t that what we keep saying? Isn’t that what the Renaissance is about?”
“Is it?” wondered Misha. “I thought it was about not giving up our differences.”
“We have to give up s-sex!” burst out Mâtho. “Th-the problem is sex. It isn’t necessary any more. Women—and, and men too if they feel it’s right—can get pregnant by taking a pill. We can be f-f-feminine and masculine s-spiritually. If people st-still want to do that, to do those things, th-they are twisted inside.”
“Are you twisted inside, Miss Catherine?” inquired Joset, with awesome insolence.
Misha rapped his glass. “Disallowed! This is not a medical examination. What I want to know is, is Mâtho twisted inside?” He leered cruelly at the Nose, who was covered in confusion.
Everyone laughed. “Order, order!” shouted Lalith. “The conversation is getting disgusting. There are ladies present!”
“Rajath hasn’t had a question,” said Lydie, when there was quiet.
“I don’t want one!” Rajath assured them, looking alarmed.
“Nor has Agathe.”
“I waive my right. The press conference is closed.” Agathe considered Catherine, her chin propped on one firm dark hand. “What shall we do with her now?”
The Phoenix Café continued its life around them. Natural music whispered that rain was falling: beating on wet roadway turf, on rooftops; on the river as it flowed; on co-op fields and tiny potagers and termite hives.
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