“Do you remember,” said Agathe, “you once asked why there was no personal entertainment in here. No tvc, no gaming?”
Catherine saw dancing eyes, a little malice; a lot of triumph.
“It was stupid of me, that wouldn’t be in period. You’d have to have virtuality couches, video and voice-phones, rows of personal computers.”
“True, and we do use Pre-Contact systems. But we don’t always stay in period,” said Lalith. “The virtual world is important to us. It has a special place in the Phoenix Café concept: it unites us with our fellow café-goers everywhere.”
“What do you think?” asked Misha. “Is she ready?”
“Feed her to the blue demons!”
Misha shouted across the room, “Leaf! Leaf! Open the hellgates!”
The Renaissance cadre erupted from their seats. People at tables round about started clapping and cheering as Catherine was hauled out of her place. It seemed this ritual was something they recognized. She was picked up bodily and carried, a bundle of skirts and veils, by Lalith and Agathe. The back wall of the Café, beyond the comfortable bar area where people were relaxing around old-world island screens, had suddenly sprouted a pair of blue “Bella” demons, time honored guardians of the entrance to a gaming hell. Thérèse darted up and pulled Catherine’s veil over her face.
“No peeping!”
They set her on her feet, and stripped off the cloak.
“You can open your eyes!”
She stood in a deep blue gloom, in the antechamber to a gaming arena, facing a semicircle of gateways. Each should be the portal to a different world, a different envie. It was a long time since Catherine had been inside a hell. She looked for racks of visors: for weapons, fx generators, mask readers. She saw only the shining floor, the dim ceiling: and the glittering photochemical gates, leading into utter darkness. The young humans stood round her. Thérèse had also shed her chador. Binte the maid had been left outside.
Misha was beside Catherine. “You’ve played arena games before?”
“Not in this life.”
“Some things have changed. A lot of things are the same. Once you’re in the game environment, or once it is in you, you’ll run around and jump and play in real space, with your physical body, in the arena beyond those doors. It’ll seem like a whole world. The sensei will keep you from colliding with anybody, or doing anything to make you conscious of the real-world scruffy hall. Remember what a sensei is? The Master Control Program. It keeps everyone in the same envie in contact, by sensing the electrical activity in your brain and converting it into void-forces signals: light, but not visible light. Your world will be made of the game libretto, the storybook that’s been put into your brain. Plus the input from all the players who have entered the same envie, wherever they may be. You understand?”
She nodded.
He took her by the shoulders, his touch circumspect and distant; and guided her into position, her back to one of the gates. He showed her a tiny vial, cupped in his palm.
“What’s that?”
“Your visor. How the game gets into your head, in our time. Look up.”
“Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound…”
She heard the murmur of his voice, felt the liquid touch her eyes. “Go!”
She dropped. Into infinite space. She was in the game.
She brought back nothing from that first visit to the Phoenix games, except the confused fragments a dream. A dark wood, a wild animal. A panther or wolf-like thing running through undergrowth, thorns tearing at its furry hide. Had the animal been Catherine? She wasn’t sure. There had been hunters, a tremendous chase; and there’d been more, so much more. It was gone. She would have to learn the skills of virtuality gaming over again. How to remain lucid: how to enjoy the unreal world to the full, without getting sucked in and losing control. She was amazed she hadn’t realized that her young friends must be gamers. She’d been fooled by the nostalgic décor of the café, recalling so strongly First Contact Earth: where virtuality had been so crude, unfashionable clunky gauntlets, visors, bodybags.
Catherine sat up.
She was in the Café’s Ladies’ cloakroom, reserved for orthodox Traditionalist women, whose culture forbade them to share the ordinary bathroom. Someone had laid her on a couch and spread the chador over her. She couldn’t remember leaving the game.
“Hello.” Misha opened the door and closed it behind him. “I shouldn’t be in here, but I’ve permission from the management. I’ve come to see if you’re all right.”
“I’m fine.” She felt that the café out there was empty. “Is it late?”
“Quite late. Everyone’s gone home.” He sat beside her. The door he had closed so quietly was made of paneled, painted wood, hung on metal hinges. How Maitri would adore the Phoenix Café. But she would never let him come here. Lord Maitri would destroy the Renaissance; he would love it to death.
“To tell the truth, we were scared. We didn’t expect you to black out.”
“I haven’t played for a very long time. About a hundred and twenty years.” Misha snorted. Catherine giggled.
“It’s quite safe. You can’t take the visor off, that worried you in there. But it really isn’t dangerous. The nanotech in the eyedrops degrades after about an hour objective time. It gets dismantled, absorbed into your brain chemistry, it’s harmless. If you can’t wait, you can still leave. All you have to do is head for the exit, just the same as ever, only it happens in your mind.”
“I’ll remember that.” She laughed. “You told me you didn’t play the games! You were extremely cutting about gaming hells!”
“We don’t play the commercial pap. We only play our own. The fact is, I can’t imagine life without gaming,” he said seriously. “Or at least: I can imagine. It would be like being smothered.”
“You write the code yourselves?”
“Some of us do. It’s a co-op, like the cafés.”
They were alone. He hadn’t come in here to talk about games tech.
“You were here before,” he whispered. “I can’t grasp that. Whether you believe it, or whether it’s the truth. I don’t know who you are; how to treat you.”
Catherine drew up her knees and leaned her chin on her folded arms. “I’m Catherine. My mother is called Leonie; she’s Lord Maitri’s human cook. Let’s say Lord Maitri adopted me as a fetus, from who knows where, and had his cook carry me to term. He brought me up as an Aleutian and conditioned me to believe I’m the reincarnation of the Third Captain, his chosen lord and one of his dearest friends. He was lonely, you see. So few of the original adventurers had come back for this last life on Earth. I can’t help believing I’m Clavel. You don’t have to think about it. I’m Catherine. Is that better?”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No, I’m not.” Catherine frowned. “What does it matter? From moment to moment, I’m Catherine. I remember, I forget. Can you remember everything that you were doing yesterday? Are you the same person? I’m not wise; I’m not a super being. I’m not even a grown up. A lot of Aleutians think Clavel is never a grown up. Treat me like that.”
He pressed her shoulders back against the wall behind the couch, and kissed her on the mouth, gripping her upper arms. Catherine responded to the kiss, instantly. Misha, his mouth open against hers, slid his free hand inside the gauzy jacket and found her breast, worked it free of the clinging underbodice. A rush of arousal flooded between them. She arched her back, insensately offering the base of her throat, where in an Aleutian body wanderers would be teeming at this moment, hurrying to be gobbled up by Catherine’s lover.
Misha drew back: he laughed excitedly.
“I warned you about the alcohol, Miss Alien!”
“Alcohol?” she repeated, puzzled.
She saw her own dead image reflected in the mirror of his eyes.
He pinned her with his weight, reached under
her skirts and pushed her thighs apart. Catherine began to struggle. “Misha, what are you doing? Stop it! Not like this! Why are you doing this to me?” She couldn’t stop him, and couldn’t make him answer. It was over too soon, he’d finished. He stood up and backed away, still breathing hard, sealing the closure of his overalls; staring down at her in sullen reproach.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t want that.”
He went and leaned against the wall by the toilet cubicles, put his head in his hands and drew a deep breath. He looked up, but didn’t look at Catherine.
“I’ve ordered you a cab. I’ll tell Garland you’ll be out in a moment. I’m leaving now, don’t follow me.”
Leaf Garland was the café manager this evening.
In the house at the Giratoire, Maitri and Vijaya were waiting in the atrium. They worried about Catherine, because of the growing risk of intercommunal violence. She went with them to the main hall, where the Aleutians were gathered for the night. Atha and his friends were playing their favorite musical game, capping each other’s variations in the wordless, expert harmonies of the Silent.
“You don’t seem to have much time for us these days.” Maitri shrugged warmly. “Don’t apologize, I’m very glad. Didn’t I introduce you to young Michael? Now tell us about your evening and the fun you’ve had.”
She managed to leave them at last, pleading her human need for sleep. In her own room she huddled on her bed, blessing the deficiencies of Aleutian mind-reading. I am Catherine, she thought. This is my life. The keening voices of the old retainers, Maitri’s unbearable patience with their whims. Atha’s constant, exhausting need to be of use: the chaplain’s rambling. Vijaya and Smrti with their endless, irritating old roués’ gossip. She took off her human clothes. Nothing was torn but there was a small bloodstain, like a split heart, penetrating the layers of her white underskirts. It was fading. It would have vanished soon.
She stared at the blood. A great trembling began deep inside her, deep in the core of her being. She felt very cold.
5
The Stardate Diaries
i
Thérèse waited in the inner office, an austere room, made large by well-tailored illusion but very simply decorated in a classic style: polished desk, corporate art, impressive antique furniture. False windows showed the autumn leaves falling in an Old Earth orchard garden; the broad cold plains, a dark forest. She lay in the embrace of a shapely armchair, cheeks flushed and lips parted; both hands tucked childishly between her thighs, where the layers of skirt and underskirt were not such a bastion of modesty as they appeared from a distance. Her straying fingers occasionally touched a soft little mat of pubic hair. She was waiting for her mother, who was in a telepresence meeting. She was certainly dozing, with kittenish signs that sexual arousal played a part in her dreams, but her long green eyes, half closed, drowsily followed the news coverage of her mother’s business, relayed to an antique monitor on Mrs. Khan’s desk.
Three hundred years ago, a German physicist called Peenemünde Buonarotti made a discovery of world-shattering importance.
The screen showed a daylight sky, scattered with brilliant points of light; stars too close and large to be hidden by the system’s sun: an unreal landscape, all the colors not false but eye-hurtingly wrong. This was a clip from one of the “Stardate Diary” entries, supposedly movies made by Peenemünde Buonarotti herself, from memory, when she returned from her weird, occult test-flights. Long believed to be fiction, later accepted as genuine reportage…. Next Peenemünde appeared, a large woman in a mannish long white overshirt, with her back to the viewers at an old-fashioned workstation. She glowed from head to toe, shedding the radiance of genius and good-will from every pore. Dish aerials, satellites, observatory domes like cartoon mushrooms decorated the margins of her screen, binary code shooting in rhythmic bursts between them (an artistic impression of Pre-Contact science).
But she was unable to develop her invention, because of insurmountable difficulties. Insurmountable, that is, to human endeavor.
The arrival of the Aleutians intervened, and Peenemünde’s great work was tainted by the plotting of anti-Aleutian fanatics.
Buonarotti’s splendid form shifted tetral by tetral into the mean, lean moody figure of Clementina Stewart, scientific director of the secret resistance movement called “White Queen.” Braemar Wilson and Johnny Guglioli, the saboteurs themselves, had been Traditionalists and could not be vilified. Clementina, notorious in the First Contact story as an embittered member of the “third sex,” had been the first to examine a stolen sample of Aleutian tissue, and, ironically, the first to observe the proof that aliens were no different mind, but very different flesh. She was always cast as Buonarotti’s evil twin. She was depicted standing, peering into a tiny black microscope like a child’s toy (a rather sketchily researched historical detail). The margins of her frame were the shuttling ridged and twined molecular chains that filled an Aleutian wanderer, an “information cell”: unlike in detail, astonishingly similar in conformation and in significance to the structure known to humans as DNA.
In the tragedy of the Sabotage Crisis, and through the harsh years of the Gender Wars, the Buonarotti device was lost.
Out fades Clementina, and Traditionalist masses appear: fleeing from burning cities (no cities were destroyed in the Gender Wars. Cities survived. It was the land outside that burned. But never mind). Running down bunker corridors. Tramping, the blind leading the blind, in endless lines across the battlefields; hordes of women wrapped in ragged veils and weeping over dead children. Thérèse sighed resignedly, slept for microseconds and peeped, alternately, until the obligatory propaganda sequences were over.
The Youro governments’ official newscasts never missed a chance to snivel over their casualties and losses in the War
But let the twisting chains of life return. Red for Aleutian, blue for human. Let shuttling chemical processes morph into skeins of stars, twisting and shifting, entering and re-entering each other in the dark and fertile void.
It was the Second Captain of the Expedition, Kumbva the engineer,
(a clip of Kumbva, the massively built alien clad in a white suit and animator’s gloves, shrugging enigmatically in Aleutian style low-rez)…who divined, over a hundred years ago, that the Diaries were a true record, and that the saboteurs had reached the shipworld by means of an instantaneous travel device. Kumbva lived among humans, and initiated the practical development of non-location travel, a joint human-Aleutian venture which now approaches the moment of triumph!
Banal “Thus Spake Zarathustra” type music. The Wright Brothers’ funny little crooked flying machine, stumbling about the sky, and morphing into a passenger jet. The jet morphing into a clunky long-defunct International Space Station, waltzing in the starry dark. And at last here’s the news item.
Now read on!
The Buonarotti project laboratory stood in wilderness, in a region of the Youroan national parks: as far away as possible from any center of population. External shots of the location were forbidden for security reasons; the coverage went straight to an interior view of the Aleutian half of the workspace. The local (human) dignitaries were not in the lab in the flesh, of course, humans were banned from this space for safety reasons: but this was not obvious on the screen. Actually, nothing looked real, not even with the fuzzy realism of Aleutian records. Possibly the antique CGI effect was some kind of nod to the fashionable Renaissance movement. More likely it was another security feature. The Project Manager was making a rare in-person visit from the shipworld; Mrs. Khan was one of the Youro politicians lining up looking honored—
Thérèse, sleepily watching, saw a red-walled hall with a long irregular empty space running down the center. Lumpy counters, lumpy gobs and blobs swinging like slime-molds from the ceiling; half-recognizable extrusions jutting from the walls. Aleutian technicians were at work (or something), weirdly squatting on those counters. They mostly seemed to be chewing, rocking to and fro, or spitting
on things. Whip-like connections flickered: monstrous living machines crawled about the floor.
It annoyed her, though she was used to this government censorship effect, that she couldn’t focus closely on anything. She couldn’t change the angle of her view, or peer into corners. The image was fixed and delimited, as if her head was in a bridle, or as if she was really asleep and dreaming.
In theory the telepresent politicians had more freedom, but they wouldn’t dare to use it. Eyes front. Try to control your body language.
There was a voiceover, and speeches were being made, but Thérèse didn’t bother to listen. She followed, idly, the unraveling and remaking of the expressions on human faces. The switching of positions in the human group; the brushing out, or daring emphasis, of alien grotesquerie. Political agents in the global grid were bidding, buying and selling fractional rights to what appeared on screen. Who got the best lighting. Whose lines were edited to the opposite meaning; or snipped out entirely. It was intolerable, really. Eventually it would stop changing. It would be dead, and reeled off, secondhand, by humble hacks like Mâtho’s father. She closed her eyes, bored. What is truth? Whatever it is, it doesn’t get into the news.
ii
Local facilities were austere. The dignitary from orbit and his entourage had been obliged to walk, from their spaceplane to the labs. They’d found this very interesting. For some it was their first visit to a planetary surface since the day they’d left Home, so many lives ago.
The telepresent humans were greeted, with local gestures in which the Project Manager had been schooled by his aides. For a while the whole ensemble stood solemnly in front of a large virtual screen running Stardate Diaries excerpts. The Aleutians were deeply uninterested in interplanetary travelogue; their appetite for adventure was sated. But they had no problem with showing respect: this was a character record, and Buonarotti was a hero.
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