They were listening attentively, but blank-faced.
“You mean like halfcastes?” hazarded Thérèse.
“Maybe. I’m sure it’s because they knew about our frivolous divide that they still call themselves ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ Is that true Lalith?”
“It would help if I knew what a horoscope was,” complained Joset.
“Or an extro-whatsit, or the other thing,” agreed Agathe.
“We need Mâtho!”
“We don’t! We’d be here forever.”
“I’ve never heard of this personality-trait package duality,” said Misha acutely. “And I’ve had a fine Aleutian education. I wonder why not.”
“Ah.” Catherine saw the pitfall too late. She always saw the pitfalls too late. “It fell out of fashion.”
“Why?” wondered Thérèse. “It might’ve helped alien-human relations.”
“Don’t be stupid,” growled her brother, casting one of his flashing, hawk-eye glances at Catherine. “They’re the superior race. It would make them seem like us. They don’t want that.”
Silence fell. A dawn stillness closed over this little disturbance of the conversation, as if it had never been. Agathe and Joset’s lights became ethereally pale, but lingered on like ghosts defying the morning. Majestic indoor aircraft, in the style of the last century (indoor, meaning they had permission to traverse the city’s mini-atmosphere) drifted across the river, taking party guests home. Catherine thought about the culture into which she’d so blithely plunged herself. Alicia Khan, Thérèse Khan…herself. Toys with minds, built from human flesh. She understood what Agathe had tried to tell her, that day in the hives. The Traditionalists were even less “human” than the Reformers…. She had returned to earth as a woman, to expiate her guilt: she was too late. The men and women she had injured were long gone. The mystery of human sexual gender had collapsed into hyperadaptive disorder, like an Earth-type species at the end of its natural life. She suddenly remembered, with the clarity of fatigue, that the Aleutians were not to blame. Not even Catherine herself. Yo soy la desintegracion. The aliens had arrived, by chance, in time to witness the last acts of a long drama: tragic, fascinating, rich and rank and strange.
How long since she had first known that?
How soon would she forget, and crave the pain again?
Thérèse sighed. Why was Imran so irritable? Since she had bested him in the competition for their mother’s favor he had been unbearably snappish. And yet why? It was inevitable. Mama couldn’t use a real, full grown young man as a sextoy. People would not accept that, it would be a scandal. And almost certainly now, he would be the heir: unless Mama played the dirty trick of having another child. Whereas Thérèse, if she lived, would have a beautiful house like this one for her retirement. A pang clutched her belly. Misha couldn’t possibly understand the slothful comfort of it all. He would never know how nice it was to lie here aching in her finery. A mere rag of flesh, surrendered to her mother’s will, she gazed at the silver river, undrinkable water. The parkland beyond, cleared to secure Alicia’s perfect vista; that punished trespassers with lingering death. All the great city in its corruption, at one with her own dainty, bleeding body.
“The world is coming to end,” she murmured. “Our civilization is dying, maybe even the Earth itself. It’s our fault, and we know it. But I still don’t want anything to change. I want everything to stay exactly the way it is now.”
iii
The trees were tall and massive. The rind was fissured vertically in long hollows so deep you could slip your whole hand inside. It was blue-black and greasy on the surface, streaked with powdery indigo where layers had been rubbed away. The branches started very high, but some trees had masses of tall whippy suckers growing at the base. The light was submarine. Fallen trunks were monstrous shipwrecks, weed-draped keels glimpsed through the broken cages of their own branches, tumbled out of the buoyant air and become impossible obstacles. In shadow there was no undergrowth, only a thick bed of dead needles; violet fading to charcoal grey. In sunlit spaces a knee-high plant with funneled palmate leaves was the most common. Its flower was a cup of two fused white petals, veined in blue; the fruit a single large black berry with a warning opalescent gleam. Masses of threadlike fungoid creeper crusted the ground with tiny jellied purple nodules. Sometimes there was a flash of yellow, an acid rose that seemed to be a parasite; which rooted itself into the tree bark.
“They’re like conifers,” said Lydie. “But I haven’t seen a cone yet.” She slid her narrow hands into two bark fissures and studied one of the acid-yellow tree limpets closely.
All science is description. Is gaze.
They were playing at being explorers, in an envie Catherine had never visited before. Lydie had persuaded her to come on a naturalizing foray. The dancer was making a catalogue of the unreal wildlife: a charming idea, but Catherine was bemused by her methods.
“Why don’t you make yourself a notebook?”
“Can’t. We don’t do that. Not in this kind of envie.”
In her last life on Earth Catherine had been one of the elite who could manipulate the game worlds. She’d used loopholes and trapdoors in the virtual architecture: created her own objects, added her own features to plot and landscape at will. In the Phoenix games her friends did the same, with varying degrees of success, but to Catherine their envies were immutable as the real. She hadn’t asked anybody how the new virtuality ware could be tricked, she was too proud. Neither had she tried to find out for herself. These playgrounds belonged to the young humans. She nodded: accepting the new whim. Truly, the Blue Forest did not seem made for magic tricks.
“I would never have guessed you were, um, a taxonomist.”
The little halfcaste shrugged. “You can pick up anything on the public grid, if you have the patience. I have masses of time with nothing to do when they lay us off between seasons. And it’s free. I got interested, don’t know why.” Lydie was thinking of climbing another tree. She had climbed several. She’d get a long way off the ground and slither down again, defeated, before she reached the lowest branches. The view didn’t change, she said.
“Gaming seems much more relaxed these days. When I was last alive it was always battles and gambling casinos and torture chambers.”
“We do that stuff too.”
“Yes, but ‘Explorers’ makes a pleasant change.”
Lydie decided against the climb and moved on.
“Who made this?” persisted Catherine. “It’s very unusual. I like it very much. It has, I don’t know: depth. It seems indifferent to us.”
“No one made it,” said Lydie, then looked at Catherine oddly. “No single person builds a game. You know that! It must have been the same when you were last around.” She giggled. “Maybe God made it. Maybe it just growed.”
It was Catherine’s first visit, but the envie was popular with café-goers, they were not alone. Brushwood huts stood in the clearing where they were camped, roofed in slabs of the thick black moss that grew on fallen trees. There was a well-used bonfire site, a pit oven; even some odd wooden sculptures, the marks of stone axe and adze gouged into the dark, dense timber. All this, Catherine knew, could have sprung up in an instant; but she thought not. Everything had the mysterious air of solidity that attaches to established virtual artifacts. The evening gathering of young people was quite large. Nobody was masked, as far as Catherine could tell: no demons, monsters, animals, no pirates or princesses; not a whimsical virtual pith helmet in sight. Blue Forest was a place where people dressed as their natural selves.
Another group had collected firewood while Lydie and Catherine were away. A fresh bonfire was built, the red charcoal from last night raked out to fuel the oven. Somebody had made some flutes from hollow sections of the
indigo suckers. As the submarine light faded a whispering music filled the clearing and a few people started to dance. Others joined them; the flute music took on a marching beat and the dancers began to sing.
Oh when the saints!
Oh when the saints!
Oh when the saints go marching in,
I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marching in!
Foraging parties brought vegetables and berries. Cooking began. The explorers sat together to talk about the Renaissance and ate: roast roots, vegetable stew, a blackish sludge that tasted of chocolate and was mildly intoxicating. They drank water, found and fetched by another party of foragers. Misha, who’d been in conclave with a group of strangers—gamers from another city—introduced to Catherine a slight, dark-skinned person whose presence was feminine, but with a casually dismissive air: if it matters. She was from Asaba, the Aleutian second capital in West Africa.
Her manners were so perfect that Catherine found herself replying in the same mode.
Eva’s Silence was complex; highly individual, self-consciously intellectual, but a mood of warm elation sparkled through it. She sat as close to Catherine as another Aleutian might: assured, Aleutianized, serenely confident in the non-Aleutian future.
Then she was embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. Maybe a lot of modern games were deep like this, or partly like this, she wouldn’t know; she’d only played at the Phoenix. But the African seemed pleased.
Misha had left them; he couldn’t understand Aleutian. At the sorting out of the sleeping arrangements, he returned and she knew what would follow. It happened whenever he had the slightest opportunity. The others knew exactly what was going on, though no one mentioned the affair in her presence, even in Silence. She’d seen Agathe saddened, because another Traditionalist young lady had fallen victim to self-destruction. She’d seen Mâtho grieving. She knew she’d lost face badly. They were probably certain now that she was simply crazy, not a highly important alien in disguise at all.
She didn’t expect them to understand. How could they?
They were to sleep out of doors; the mossy huts must be reserved for some other purpose. Guards were set, to watch for “wild beasts or savages.” Everyone else lay down on couches of the indigo needled shoots, around the sinking fire. Misha of course managed to lie beside her. When the camp was quiet he turned on his side. The bonfire made bright red pinpoints in his eyes.
“Please don’t,” she whispered. “Not here.”
He took no notice. She watched the cold, smiling curve of his mouth as he stared into her face, while his fingers probed between her thighs and into that soft, membranous channel.
“Has it ever struck you,” he murmured, “that envie means desire?”
He loosened her clothes, bent his head and sucked hard at her nipples, first one and then the other. He pushed her thighs further apart, the same blunt, autistic gesture as that first time in the cloakroom. He held his claw in one hand, for guidance: she felt the pressure of his knuckles, then the blind head and swollen stem driving between the walls of muscle: rhythmically, piston-hard. She stared over his shoulder. Her back was jolted against the bed of branches, a piece of flotsam battered against rocks. He reached his climax, slumped heavily against her for a moment and then rolled away.
Catherine listened to the night sounds of the unreal forest.
She was not innocent, nothing could make Catherine innocent. But tonight she was desolate. She wanted to take command of the envie, to make something nasty happen to Misha. Not rape, but something bad. She didn’t know how to start. She didn’t even know how long the session would last: subjective time was one of the many parameters she didn’t control. Finally she got up, carefully unsnagging her skirts from the branches. Head for the exit. She would leave. She took two steps, and felt a tree in front of her. She groped around the massive base, and found another. The fire had disappeared. She could see nothing at all.
“Catherine?”
A sound of flint striking against metal. A chip of orange light broke out. She’d almost stumbled over one of the guards; it was Mâtho. She dropped on her haunches beside him.
“I want to leave,” she whispered. “How do I get out of here?”
“You just leave,” he said. “If you want to go back, you’re back.”
But the Blue Forest stayed, strong as pitch and strangely scented.
“Everybody wants different things,” whispered Mâtho, very sad in the glow of his tinder-box light. “But it fits together somehow.” He was holding her hands. He seemed to understand that someone might even want, positively want, the shame and sorrow of loving a person like Misha Connelly.
“We don’t have to go anywhere,” he said. “We can have more and more worlds, without going anywhere. A universe can fit into someone’s head. I think that’s what God said to Adam and Eve in the garden. Stay here. Become more and more yourselves: don’t spread out and get lost. But they wouldn’t listen.”
She crouched there for a while, feeling the forest that stretched limitless around them, immovably real as her need for pain. Then she went back and lay down again in her place; and waited for the night to end.
iv
Misha had rented a room, an hour’s journey away in a neighboring quartier. Chance opportunities were no longer enough, they needed a place to go. His family home was impossible, Catherine understood that. She also understood that he wanted badly to rape her in Maitri’s house: but that she could not allow, however covertly; and she waited in vain for him to force her outright. He was too frightened of the aliens.
They traveled to their secret room together one day, a short time after Catherine’s visit to the Blue Forest. He collected her from the Giratoire in a cab, but had it drop them at the nearest lev station. He repeated his warning about traveling on the metro alone, then led her to the standard class gate. Their carriage was crowded. They stood in the aisle, pressed by the bodies of other passengers. He bent to whisper in her ear.
“You see why you mustn’t do this?”
“What happens?”
“Someone will fingerfuck you. They’ll get a hand inside your honor cloak and up your skirts when you’re pushed so close in the crowd that you can’t escape. Or they’ll rub up against the cleft of your buttocks, and come that way. You’ll find their stuff on your clothes afterward.”
“Who will do this?” she asked softly.
“Some man. The sperm count may be low but there are enough men around. Not only in my party: think of Joset. It used to happen to my sister.”
Catherine stood in the charged air, surrounded by these secret gropings and penetrations. The women were all veiled; or the veiled were all women. It had become a city ordinance, in the growing intercommunal unrest. Reformer women, and the less male-looking Reformer men, must all wear the chador in public, or their safety could not be guaranteed. These were ordinary people, far from the baroque inventions of the rich, but they were playing the same game. The women’s heads were bowed. The smothering cloaks had the strange effect of making their bodies naked. They were dry-mouthed and compliant, nipples stiff and cunts wet with perverse arousal. T
hey had chosen their role. Like Catherine they were greedy for abuse. Maybe they thought they were paying for humanity’s crimes. Maybe they thought that this way, some day, they would be loved. The men’s eyes were pinpoint blank, like Misha’s eyes in the forest night.
It was noon. The streets were very quiet where they emerged. They passed through a narrow lobby guarded by a concierge of ancient make, into a cobbled courtyard and up flights of steps clad in some long-lost form of polymer sheeting. It had a static pattern of green and grey: Maitri, she thought, you’d like this…. Their room was at the back. It was bare except for a hybrid foam bed, without legs, an ancient bentwood chair, and a washstand with a waste bucket, standing without a screen against one wall. Catherine looked out of the window. Tiers of ancient glazing stared back at her: festooned with drying laundry, patched with barrier gel; some frames empty and sprouting fronds of grass. Rock pigeons stepped the cobbles below on coral feet, and crooned overhead in the cliffs of crumbled stone. A sparrow hopped on the windowsill below, and looked up with a bold, questioning chirrup. It was late summer again, she remembered: how strangely the time had passed. She wondered why Misha had chosen this gentle place, its quiet melancholy and air of dusty romance. Did he, too, think wistfully of what might have been? But she did not want to think about him as a person, about his feelings. That was dangerous.
He lay on the foam bed, in his Aleutian overalls, propped on one elbow.
“Have you heard of paper flowers?”
“Is it a body-morphing cosmetic? Something you swallow, and you get a temporary shift in your appearance?”
“It can be. It used to be. D’you want to try some?”
She came over. “What does it do?”
“Hold out your hand.”
He took out a small tissue folder, and shook two or three minute slivers of pastel colored wafer onto her palm.
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