Phoenix Café

by Gwyneth Jones

  Maybe you can fly.

  —from Lydie’s death dive Catherine fell into her own reality, perception struggling to right itself. Her heart pounding from that plunge. She must be in the house at the Giratoire, wired up to a tvc show. No: she was in the sick bay in Tracy Island base, and it was full of smoke. The enemy had vanished.

  Had she been watching Lydie on her visor display? Or imagining that scene? The pens that held the blanks were still. There were bodies on the floor, one of them was Mâtho. Agathe crouched beside him; she’d strapped a breathing mask onto his face and was holding a wad of dressing against his stomach, applying pressure to a wound. She was wearing a mask herself, so was Lalith. Agathe’s “personal effects” were scattered around her; Lalith was scrabbling in them for more First Aid. Catherine pulled off her helmet, and at once began to cough hard.

  “Catherine?”

  Mâtho turned his head. The eyes above the mask appealed to her.

  “They ran away. They’ve gone to seal the level, so they can kill us—” whimpered Rajath.

  “I think he’s going be all right,” said Agathe, but she was crying.

  Catherine dropped to her knees. “Cold,” sighed Mâtho. “I’m so cold.”

  “Oh God,” Agathe felt his hands and breast. “He’s losing heat fast! He’s ice! Must be massive internal bleeding! There’s nothing I can do!”

  “Catherine.”

  Mâtho tugged her gauntleted hand to his lips, and his eyes grew fixed—

  Joset and Misha were hammering on the inner doors, shouting through the lock to the bride’s minders on the other side. They couldn’t use superheat, it would destroy the containment. They had to get in there, and seal themselves in with whatever they found: until they’d destroyed the bride and her children. They were shouting to the midwives of this terrible birth, “You’re surrounded, you’re going to die, we’re about to suck your air out, we have poison gas—”

  Failed, thought Catherine, amazed at her own calm. Of course we’ve failed; this was a lost hope; we didn’t have a chance. She replaced her helmet. Might as well die fighting. Suddenly the doors to the containment hissed and were flung open. Bodies rushed out. They were dressed and masked in heavy quarantine suits: but they weren’t armored. Nurses or guards, they raced through the scene of carnage and disappeared into the smoke.

  “Something’s gone wrong in there,” cried Rajath.

  In a flash of stillness Catherine saw how Helen’s partner had been cherished. Her flowers, her jewels, pretty furniture, and pictures on the walls: her bridal dress and wreath and veil in a display case. She had seen that white lace and satin gown before—or its twin—on the virtual screen in Mr. Connelly’s study. Now, on a narrow bed, a young woman, restrained by straps and clamps, lay in premature labor. Something, maybe the panic caused by their arrival, had precipitated the birth. Monitoring machinery lay scattered, a trolley of instruments sprawled on its side. The children were being born from every pore; the mother’s skin was tearing open. She lifted her close-shorn head and looked at Catherine. Her eyes were pinpoints, drugged deep. She opened her mouth—to speak? A weapon-creature burst out: and broke their paralysis.

  They burned bed and everything on it. Superheat flare engulfed them, scalding them through their armor. Catherine walked into the furnace; it leapt around her. Every flame a life; every flame a self. All of them Catherine, and she was all of them: no excuses, no denials. She was the guilty, the collaborator, denying, colluding, greedy for catastrophe, hungry for destruction. She plied her weapon savagely, plunging into the rapacity of being, and the flames were dancing Everything Says I.

  I am with you, they sang. Always with you, blood and fire in the void.

  And still herself.

  The ruined hospital room returned. She stood, her weapon dropping to her side, feeling sated and happy. The riot control gas must have dispersed: she was breathing outside air again. It smelled of seared suit and roast meat. The young woman’s bed was a black, glossy mass of fused carbon. She counted the figures around her, the suits without insignia that were still standing. Her head display was blank. She pulled off her helmet.

  “Misha? Joset?”

  One of the dead Campfire Girls in the room with the pens stirred. She sat up, poked at the charcoal cleft that divided her belly, and began to laugh. She pulled off her head. She was not a woman. She was a young man. She was the waiter who had served wine to Catherine, hours or days and half a world away, in the dining room at the Phoenix Café.

 

  Other corpses stood. The standing suits took off their heads. The company gathered: Misha, Joset, Lalith, and Agathe. Mâtho and Rajath; other faces she didn’t know or didn’t know well. A heap of shattered limbs materialized in a corner, picked itself up and became Lydie, grinning.

  Everyone took a bow.

  “You have been taking part,” announced Lydie, “in an act of ceremonial magic, meant to keep bad at bay and mark the commencement of a new era. This is the birth of the Phoenix, which we have celebrated in the leitmotif of our culture: that means play-fighting, and as much cost-free arousal as we can get. Well, nearly free. And we hope you’ll be a good sport and forgive us, as we’ve forgiven you.”

  They took another bow.

  “You mean this was nothing but a game?” She ran to the pens. They were plastic packing cases. She was speechless.

  “If this is a game,” said Lalith. “Then all the games have new rules.”

  “What—? I don’t understand!”

  “You will,” assured Lydie. “You’ll find out why we did this soon. You won’t understand until long afterwards. It takes time for it to sink in.”

  The company saluted her once more. They filed out, still partly cloaked in virtual costumes, through a gap that had appeared in the sick-bay wall.

  Then.

  She was alone. She remembered: dying, falling in flames. She realized, with astonishment, that at last she knew what the nightmare meant. She had been here, in this strange antechamber, once before. She had passed once before, in another lifetime, through an intensely detailed, absorbing dream: and come out on the other side. She had seen a remembered sky; she had tasted the fount of memory on her lips.

  She didn’t know how it had been done, but she must be Home.

  But something troubled her. The light was wrong, the air was wrong.

  Movement behind her made her spin around. She looked into a long band of mirror, above a spotlessly clean counter that framed odd-looking wash basins. The face she saw was her human face, the body was clothed in Aleutian overalls and a dark brown, figured robe. Nearby there was a confused noise, as of many people and voices milling in a large echoing space. She opened the door that seemed to lead into this noise, and stepped out.

  11

  The Earlier Crossing

  She was not on Home again. She was not in the Phoenix Café. She was in a huge bustling concourse, the distant walls cheerfully, statically decorated with blue sky and clouds, between big, peculiar minitel screens. Candelabra of electric light globes hung overhead. There was an expanse of mineral-glass window through which she saw a disc shaped, domed aircraft sailing up above the horizon. Others like it were ranked on the ground.

  A group of people was heading her way, clearly an important party: surrounded by officials in uniform, and guards in plainclothes, whose manner was awed, obsequious and wary. Catherine watched their approach and set out to intersect their path. She was soon walking beside one of them.

 

  Yudisthara, an honest, rather timid merchant whom Catherine had known well in her previous life on earth, started: and then beamed in welcome.

 

 

 

  <
No, but I managed to get around it.>

  Yudisthara accepted this without difficulty. The Pure One had always been able do things on the giant planet that nobody else dreamed of trying.

 

  Catherine’s heart stopped.

  Yudi glowed.

  Yudisthara was not a Landing Parties veteran, but his sympathies (he felt) had been clear. The glory of being the one to impart the news to Catherine brought tears to his eyes. He caught the Pure One’s hand, and pressed it.

 

  remarked Catherine faintly.

 

  murmured Catherine (tactfully embracing Yudi’s proud record of public dissidence). She scanned the Aleutian party, hampered by her dumb human chemistry.

 

  supplied Catherine.

 

  murmured Catherine.

  Yudisthara glanced at the USSA functionaries. (He had been told the new name of their country several times, but he couldn’t keep it in his head.) They rather frightened him. he asked. He felt warmly towards Catherine, who was not usually so confidential with a dull business-person like himself. He was hoping their companionship might last for the whole trip.

  said Catherine.

  The delegation absorbed her: faces she knew, others that rose from the sea of inclusive memory; full of congratulations and rueful amusement over the triumph of her local protégées. No one was surprised that the Pure One had turned up. Trust Clavel…and after all, didn’t the Third Captain have a right to be here, on the very last venture of the Expedition?

  Catherine began already to grasp that she would never know the true status of the raid on Tracy Island Base. Was that a game, a kind of psychic travel-sickness; or a new kind of reality? Let it be. For now, she just knew she had been taken to the cleaners, as the locals used to say. Taken to the cleaners, wrung out, and hung up to dry by the young people at the Phoenix Café. She laughed, a bubble of pure, irrational elation rising in her until she thought her feet would leave the ground.

  And prepared, as Yudi hugged her arm and the solemn guides stopped to consult, talking not to each other but to little rectangular medallions they wore on chains around their necks, to be very bored.

  12

  In the Field Hospital

  Catherine saw Misha once more. It was the night of the Departure.

  The Aleutians had chosen the moment of midnight, north-west Youro time zone (because of the location of the Buonarotti laboratories); and a date in early spring by the old seasonal calendar. It was a year and four months, by that reckoning, since Catherine’s visit to L’Airial. The leave-taking celebrations were long over, lingering Aleutians had packed the last spaceplanes. “Aleutian Rule” in Youro would end, nominally, on the stroke of midnight: there was already no alien presence to support it. Intercommunal violence was no longer something that happened on the news. It was everywhere.

  Catherine was still living in the house at the Giratoire. Leonie hadn’t managed to get her family away before the unrest became general; she’d wisely decided to stay put for the time being. The Car Park food market had become a field hospital and displaced persons center. Catherine was working there, alongside the staff of the former Aleutian Mission, the police and other charitable organizations. She’d just been relieved after a shift at a dressing station. She was wandering in a daze, looking for water powder so she could wash her hands, when she saw Misha, by the desk where new arrivals were processed: wearing jeans and a grubby tee-shirt.

  He looked up and saw Catherine.

  So this was how they met, under the low concrete sky of the Car Park, among the dispossessed, the wounded, the confused old people; the lost children. He came towards her, she went to meet him.

  “I might have known you’d be doing something like this,” he said, with a reflexive glance into his internal mirror. “Have you rejoined the Mission?”

  “No, I’m just helping out the medics. I’m unskilled labor.”

  “Unskilled labor? Trust you, Cath. An archaism for every occasion.” She saw the old acquisitive gleam.

  “Feel free to be unskilled labor too, if you like the mot.”

  They couldn’t stand still. They walked between two rows of cots, where the first in line for emergency treatment were waiting, mostly in silence. Misha seemed smaller. People do that, she thought. They change size: receding into the distance or looming in close-up. She rubbed the drying blood on her hands, and saw the rusty crescents under her nails. She remembered their first meeting.

  “Did you enjoy your trip to meet the Feds?”

  “Thank you, yes I did. It’s a strange place. A time capsule. You’d like it.”

  But he must be saturated with images from the Americas, unless he’d turned hermit. They’d abandoned their Great Quarantine, if only for data. News, images, records, every kind of contact was flooding to and fro.

  She had spent the tour with Yudisthara, and felt truly fond of him by the end. They’d parted kindly. She’d returned to a city still overwhelmed by the thrilling news that the Renaissance Movement had built a Buonarotti device. Yudi, bless him, had not quite got it right with his report of beacons and souvenirs: that was science fiction. But the Movement had approached Dr. Bright, who had found their evidence (impossibly abstruse as it might be to the average Aleutian) convincing. It was all based on games technology, Catherine gathered, and something the legendary Sidney Carton had once said. Anyway, everything had changed. The Buonarotti technology was a shared venture again, and the humans were “locals”—not inferior beings, but neighbors and valued customers, who would undoubtedly turn up in future lives, and had better be treated with respect.

  And then there was the doomsday plot to “eradicate” Ref
orm. Never a serious danger: a handful of insane extremists had been nowhere near actually replicating the Aleutian weapons of mass destruction. But the fate of the horribly misused young ladies was a shocking revelation. There had been resignations; there had been abrupt disappearances from public life. Mr. Connelly the wilderness keeper was not likely to be seen in society again. There were calls for drastic reform, and an agreement in principle that Youro would abolish the practice of creating what were vulgarly known as “sextoys.” In the future, all engineered embryos would be equal in law…. It was one of those scandals that could have been enormous, if it had come to light at a neutral time. As it was, the horrors sank into urban myth and the terrifying theft of proliferating weapon material was swiftly shuffled out of the news. Nobody wanted to know anything nasty about the wonderful Device.

  Catherine had stayed away from the Phoenix Café, she felt she’d be out of place. It was the Movement’s hour; let them enjoy it without an Aleutian elbowing into the line-up. Let them come to me, she’d thought; later, if we’re really friends. But nobody had come, and soon she’d had her own distractions. All the Departure leave-takings, and then the crisis in the streets. Now here was Misha. They threaded their way between bodies and bundles and bloodstained litter to a refreshments counter where volunteered catering machines were dispensing tea and biscuits.

  “Did you know Mâtho died?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did know that.”

  Mâtho and his father had been killed defending their premises. It wasn’t clear how the attack had begun, whether they’d been targeted or simply caught in crossfire. Catherine hoped, but she would never know, that Mâtho’s publication of her video diaries hadn’t had anything to do with it.

  “Have you seen Lydie?”

  “Not recently.” He knew she was thinking of Lydie’s fake death on Tracy Island. “Nor Rajath. I haven’t been keeping up with the Café circle much. But I’m sure they’re fine. Imran’s going to have a post be in the new administration, did you know? Joset says that’s definite, he got it from Agathe. Maybe there’ll be a post for Thérèse, who knows, these days. Those two always knew how to look out for themselves, didn’t they.”