Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

He turned the exhibit in his hands.

  The Busy Person involuntarily stepped back.

 

 

  Bright affected to recognize the exact source of visitor’s unease for the first time. He smirked.

  The Busy Person regarded him with shuddering wonder.

  said Bright casually. He went on turning the mock-up in his hands, watching the little simulacra in their hopeless struggle. The skin (lively, open-pored, soft textured, so different from those insensate human surfaces) was dotted with irregular marks, about the color of a bad bruise, that caught the eye strangely: the notorious empty-centered sores of weapons production.

  he murmured, awed.

  “I am become Death,” he quoted softly, aloud. “Destroyer of Worlds.”

  The dignitary from orbit kept to the point.

 

 

  Dr. Bright abruptly dropped the exhibit back into its cage. His visitor looked at the wall of the laboratory, expressing wordless sympathy (restrained by reason and prudence) for the humans on the other side.

  The scientist bristled. he snapped.

  he added gravely.

  Bright corrected him absently.

  The Busy Person started, for the first time genuinely displeased. He turned to his entourage, encompassing with a gesture one tiresome duty done, and one more to be endured. They made their embraces, Bright submitting with better grace now that the intruders were leaving. The shipworld visitation fed itself into the entry lock, and out into the cold.

  Dr. Bright stood and fumed. he snarled, with withering scorn.

  Bright glared around him, defying hostile comment.

 

  His silent diatribe ended abruptly. He was gagged. Like Catherine, like Maitri: trapped and helpless, in the grip of the Commonalty’s will.

  The technicians and artisans waited. Visits from officialdom always had this effect. When the rant was over, they prompted their master.

 

  He pushed through a partition into his office, and could be seen brooding there, his slender clawed hands working into running pads, his meager nasal flaring.

  murmured one skilled artisan to his neighbor.

  Shortly, Bright—still muttering and seething body-wise—came out of his area, donned a human-made greatcoat and stormed off to join the VIP’s party and the human team. Poor guy, his people remarked, with varying degrees of affection, toleration and respect. Signifiers are so highly strung. They forget that everything must happen. They get trapped in short-term distress.

  They returned to their work: assisting in the unlabeled processes of the continuum. They agreed that everything Dr. Bright said, as far as they could follow it, was true. But if the humans were bound to suffer now, no doubt they’d get their revenge in lives to come. There is no lasting harm. It was beyond the technicians’ imagination to conceive otherwise.

  iii

  Mrs. Khan joined Thérèse in the outer office.

  “How draining telepresence is,” she complained, tossing the transcript she’d just received onto her desk. “Sheer nonsense, as usual. Why do we bother? Everyone knows it’s against their religion to give fixed meaning to the Common Tongue.” She dropped into a chair. Thérèse sat up, sleepily rubbing her eyes, as the monitor picture winked out.

  “Come here, sweetheart.”

  The elegant Mrs. Khan was haggard as if she’d made that grueling trip to the Buonarotti lab in person, and spent the last hour under torture there. She drew her daughter close, and—summoning up a teasing smile—tweaked the sweetly upstanding nipples outlined by her dainty bodice. “My little flower. You’re such a darling. When I’m in one of those stupid meetings, I want you so much.” Her expression shifted from affection to unashamed appetite. Her hands, like two separate hungry creatures, kneaded at Thérèse’s breasts, her face burrowed into her daughter’s skirts. The expensive fabric melted, with well-tailored obedience, at the touch of the lips and tongue it recognized. Mrs. Khan gripped Thérèse’s buttocks, holding the girl’s crotch in place at her mouth as if Thérèse was a spare rib or a slice of melon. Thérèse’s breath came fast. Soon she was pressi
ng herself rhythmically against her mother’s face. Her back arched, she gave a cry: a rush of liquid flowed from her.

  Mrs. Khan sat back, wiping her lips. “So sweet,” she murmured, discreetly rubbing her own lap, and stretching in relief. “Ah, that was good. Exactly what I needed. I can come just thinking about my Thérèse, but it’s far better to have you here. Darling, I hope you weren’t too bored. You’re so reviving.” She pulled her daughter down onto her lap and Thérèse cuddled there, her cheek against the firm maternal breast.

  “I’m glad you and Catherine have become friends,” said Mrs. Khan pensively, after a while. “I thought you didn’t like her, when she came to visit.”

  “All she did was sit with you and talk politics. Boring!”

  Mrs. Khan chuckled. “Were you jealous? There’s no need to be, sweetheart. I’m not interested in her in that way! But we must invite her again. Don’t ask me why, accept that it’s important to your mama.” She rocked Thérèse in her arms. “My little dolly. I have such a difficult existence, one long balancing act on a knife edge. You wouldn’t understand, but you can take it from me that life is sheer hell for a career woman, the same now as it was in Braemar Wilson’s day. Some things never change! You trust me, don’t you darling?”

  She sat up, briskly setting Thérèse aside. Looking into an inward mirror she touched her hair, arranged her light veil.

  “Must go. I’ll be back soon. Then we’ll have a whole half hour, my pet.”

  Thérèse returned to her armchair. She thought of Agathe, whose well-meant sympathy she resented. You think you’re so “Perfect,” Reformer. I’d like to see you try to walk on my path…. She didn’t want to watch the tv. Staring into a screen was tiring and unnatural. Without the benefit of implanted gadgetry, which her mother would never allow for a young lady, she awarded herself the freedom of infinite space, and drifted among the stars.

  6

  Blocks and Docks

  i

  At Christmas, traditionally, everyone gave presents. Maitri, delirious with joy, helped Catherine to ransack the Old Earth hypermarkets around the Giratoire. Together they prowled half-empty stacks in those old temples of consumerism, discovering wonders. Catherine sweated blood matching imagination to Mâtho’s noble poverty; demure excess to the Khans’ impossible wealth. It was fun.

  One morning in January, a closed car came to the Giratoire house. Catherine was summoned to the atrium: Thérèse’s maid was waiting for her. Binte, shrouded from head to foot, would only say. “Come. Miss Thérèse wants.” The elderly Aleutians found people-shaped machines very disturbing, so Catherine went with her quickly. She climbed into the back of the car, and immediately someone threw a black bag over her head. She struggled, horrified, but the bag was a chador, and Thérèse was beside her: giggling as Binte arranged the rich slippery folds of nature-identical silk.

  “I’m taking you on an outing. You’ve been with Misha, now come with me.”

  The vehicle moved, smoothly, into the secret void of closed car travel.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shopping!” Thérèse’s eyes gleamed through the silken mesh.

  Shortly the car stopped. Thérèse’s door opened. A huge shapeless figure, also veiled and giving no signals as to its sex, stood bowing, a red, gold-figured shawl wrapped round its shrouded head and shoulders. They were in a gloomy, narrow court; the air was stifling, pungent with the tang of cheap building material: barely sanitized, compacted human shit. Catherine saw window-pocked walls, a fragment of sandy sky. The red-shawled person ushered Thérèse, Catherine and the maid along a covered passage into a large dimly lit room. The walls were lined with curtained cubicles. Catherine glimpsed coupled bodies moving jerkily. Bedraggled young humans, naked and partly clothed, mostly with female-styled bodies, chatted together while they waited for customers. Thérèse whispered with their guide, then unceremoniously shoved Catherine into one of the empty cubicles.

  “Don’t be frightened. No one will hurt you. Do whatever you like!”

  Binte had stayed with her. The maid squatted in a corner, an expressionless dark blot of fabric. Catherine sat on a narrow bed-with-legs that took up almost all the rest of the space. The mattress had the same kind of tired hygienic cover as the one in the remand cell. A nodule of hybrid growth, roughly the shape of a pink daisy flower, clung to one wall, pumping out a flood of apples, meadows and new bread to mingle with the stink of shit. The curtain in front of the cubicle was pushed aside. The big figure in the red shawl looked in, withdrew to mutter with someone unseen. This second person entered boldly. He was half naked, well-nourished, broad-chested; cosmetically male. He stood rubbing his hairy chin and looking at Catherine. He opened his loose trousers, and displayed his sexual equipment. He had a formidable erection.

  he asked, in gesture.

 

  It was an inadequate response, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Binte sat quietly. Garnet colored light seeped through the gel curtain. She could see the man’s stolid, rather brutal face: his hands stroking and occasionally offering again the thick male human claw. There was a continual coming and going, crying and muttering from the long room outside. The man left. The red-shawled figure looked in, and went away. Another man appeared, sat for a while displaying his wares, then he left too. They were alone for a while. At last Binte got up and beckoned. They went out. Thérèse was there in her black shroud, doubled over and moaning. Their guide had to help her into the car.

  “Oh God!” she wailed, tearing open the hood of her chador, (smart fabric parting with a faint whimper of protest). Her hair was disheveled, her cheeks flushed and green eyes wild. She clutched at her crotch.

  “So big! God, so big! I’m not going to be able to sit down properly for a week.” She dissolved into helpless giggles. “Did you do it, Catherine? How many did you have?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Thérèse took out a compact. She smoothed her face with a film that wiped away all signs of disarray; ran her fingers through her hair, which rearranged itself into the sleek blonde ringlets of her set. “I get Camille, that’s the old hag in the red shawl, to find them for me. They’re drivers, valets, office boys, that sort of thing. They’re kept pumped up with testo for fashion. It’s quite safe. They never see my face.” She stared defiance. “Are you shocked?”

  “No,” answered Catherine, truthfully.

  Thérèse burst into peals of laughter.

  “What about Binte,” said Catherine, when the noise had subsided. “Maybe the johns won’t tell, but isn’t she programmed to report on you?”

  “How funnily you talk, like an Old Earth game. I’m not an idiot. I can fix her. As far as she knows, we’ve been doing some in-person shopping. That’s what her record will show. We’ve been buying antique clothes. I thought you’d like that.” She glared at Catherine. “All right, I know it’s risky. What do you expect? I have to have something. Or I’d go mad.”

  Briefly her face became hard and adult: insisting on her right to relief from an intolerable strain. She looked curiously like her mother, the politician. Then she started to cry.

  “Mama would kill me,” she wailed. “Oh God, mama would kill me!”

  The car carried them on. Thérèse stopped crying and sealed her chador. They sat in their small room, without any sense of motion. Anodyne images of rivers, trees, gardens, flowed around their walls.

  “You’re going to get another invitation to our house,” said Thérèse. She spoke very softly, saying goodbye to Catherine on the steps of the Giratoire house. “Don’t accept.”

  “Why not?”

  “Make an excuse. For my sake make it a good one. Don’t let it seem that you were warned off, or that you don’t like me. Maybe I’m imagining things, and don’t ask any questions because I won’t answer: but be careful of my mother.”

  One night, after meeting at the café and drinking a great deal of complicated wine, Catherine and he
r first friends—Joset, Misha, Rajath, Mâtho—took cabs to the corrida, to see Lydie in action. They went in-person, since there was no tvc at the Phoenix Café. The others chose star names from the program, discussing the season’s form in this fashionable interactive sport. Catherine chose Lydie for her virtual partner. They sat in the Connelly box, right above the arena, premier tvc bands clinging to their temples. The show was called bull-dancing in English, in reference to a very ancient tradition, but the animals were female. Bulls were reserved for a different spectacle. The cattle ran out: mighty, splendid, astonishing beasts, with the pure, extraordinary beauty of twenty thousand year old cave-paintings. They held their tasseled horns high, and looked around at the crowd with alert, intelligent eyes. The dancers joined them: slim young athletes in their white tight suits and brocade jackets, springing into casual backflips and somersaults. For the parade the dancers and their dangerous partners were separated by invisible barriers. Then the arena was cleared and the fun began. The friends in the Connelly box shouted and gasped in the grip of adrenalin-fueled euphoria: blood, muscle and brain united with the performers. The crudely hooked-up poor in the tiered seats yelled as loudly and seemed equally transported. The acrobatics, the “dancing,” was magical to Catherine. It was not so popular with the crowd as the art of the ecarteurs, playing chicken with the charging cattle.

  There were several injuries, but no fatalities tonight.

  They left at the end of the first tournament. All of them were dripping sweat, grinning maniacally; their eyes, in the light of a full moon, black mouths of gaping pupil. The poor and the employed streamed around them, into an ancient street that stank of big, hot animals, dung and piss and violence. To be at the arena in-person was as much of a thrill as the sport itself. The mood of the people was uncertain, unbalanced by rumors of the imminent Departure. No one sure what was allowed now, on the brink of the end of the world.