Phoenix Café Read online

  The green of Maitri’s garden seemed to be in mourning. White everted stars looked up at her, each pushing out a furred yellow tongue. Thick, water-hungry leaves brushed her thighs. They were crying: help us, save us! We can’t survive without you now….

  She was suddenly aware that her bladder was bursting. She had to drop to her haunches among the vegetables, barely managed to get her underwear out of the way in time. She stayed there, in the rising fumes of warm urine, laughing weakly: she should have used the waste bucket in the cell. But she could not remember these things. The body was human; the spirit knew a different set of rules. Under stress she simply forgot. Her head between her hands, she found herself staring at the hairy base of her belly, where hid the secret human female parts. Will the flowerbud open when I grow up? Will it be beautiful? Maitri had told her: darling, I don’t know. That’s partly what you wanted to find out. Real young ladies did not wear trousers. They wore long, layered flimsy skirts and tight little bodices, veils and scarves and jackets glittering with gold and silver and gemstones: but no underwear. Catherine had been fascinated to discover, where it mattered. She wanted to be authentic, but she had baulked at that. Aleutians are a prudish people. She thought of the girl at the police station, and was again ashamed of her panic. But now she must go into the house. She must face Maitri and the others. They didn’t like the Mission. It was going to be hard to admit her defeat. Her head pounded. Always defeated—always. It was too much to bear.

  In the kitchen, in the part of the house that belonged to the human servants, she found her mother. Leonie was cooking something on her open-flame hob, the perilous-looking device on which she produced her miracles of Old Earth cuisine. Peter, her human son, was sharpening knives.

  “Maman?”

  But her foster mother (breast as flat and hard as if she was an Aleutian now: it was a long time since she’d suckled a child) had refused for years to acknowledge that Catherine had ever been her baby.

  “Yes, Miss?”

  Catherine could taste the stinging tinker-reek of Peter’s work box. The smell of cooking made her dizzy; Leonie’s rebuff brought her to the verge of tears. But Leonie herself was visibly shaking. Peter kept his eyes on his work in an unnatural pantomime of unconcern. She stood between them, human blood dry-smeared on her clothes and in her hair. She’d forgotten they hated her missionary work worse than Maitri did. She lifted her shoulders in the gesture that meant a smile in Aleutian, an apology in human body-language; spoke earnestly and kindly.

  “I know I look terrible. The blood, I know the blood looks bad.” She tried to laugh. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to try to convert you!” She gestured, with the flowers that she’d brought in. “I picked these for Maitri. Could I have a vase?”

  Peter kept on madly sharpening. Leonie stared in wondering pity.

  “You can’t have those indoors,” she said. “They’re poisonous.” But she brought a vase, and filled it with water from the hydrobiont pump on her kitchen counter. “Lord Maitri’s waiting for you in the atrium.” She swallowed. “Maybe you should get washed first.”

  “No, it’ll wait. Maitri won’t mind.”

  The atrium was a large and splendid square hall, colonnaded around the sides. A dome of the marvelously transparent local glass, stained in sweeps of green and gold and ruby, rose above the central space. Pieces of ancient machinery, beautifully restored, stood among troughs and tubs of native plants. The centerpiece was an examination pit from a motor garage, which Maitri had had transported here, and let into the floor. It held a small fountain (fed from the “burst main”) with cushioned seats beside the pool; and gave off from its blackened walls a faint romantic whiff of engine oil.

  Lord Maitri was alone, resplendent in one of his antique morning robes. “My dear,” He put the potato flowers aside and gripped her hands. “I hope the police have been nice to you. They’ve been being very polite to us. Now tell me all about it.”

  Maitri spoke “formally,” in English. When he and his ward were alone they always conversed this way. Catherine had learned to manage very well in the Common Tongue, but she was still at a loss sometimes, deprived of the living traffic of the air. He shrugged ruefully, waving a hand to indicate the rest of the Aleutian household. “I thought I wouldn’t subject you to ‘the zoo,’ so early in the morning. But everybody wants you to know that we’re glad you’re safe.”

  “There isn’t much to tell,” Catherine said. She recovered her hands, folded her arms under her breasts, delivered her report in a firm, level tone. “I was attending a conversion ceremony. It was in an apartment belonging to one of our proselytes—belonging to his family that is, but the rest of the household were away for the evening. I was alone with the candidates. I tried to keep them indoors but they kept rushing out again. I warned them that we could be in trouble if we invaded a public space, but they wanted to bear witness to the good news. It was chaos, I admit. But no one was getting hurt…that didn’t want to be, I mean. It was almost over when the orthodoxers arrived. They had heat guns, I don’t know where from: totally illegal. They fried everything in sight, the building turned on the powder-sprinklers for the whole landing and then the police turned up. They arrested me. Me, not the orthodoxers, of course. They put me in solitary in an unmonitored cell, and refused to charge me. So I refused to eat, and that was embarrassing I suppose. So this morning they decided to throw me out and here I am.”

  She rubbed at her sleeves. “But I’m not hurt. It’s not my blood.”

  “I almost wish it was.” Maitri burst out. “Hurt? I don’t care if you’re sliced to bits. I don’t know why I said I hoped the police had been nice. I wish they would beat you.”

  He drew a breath. “It’s not that I don’t agree, in principle, with what the Mission teaches. Of course permanent death is pure superstition. Their physiology has not been much researched, but they must be born again the same as we are: the same chemical identities, the same set of individuals that goes to make up a society. They only have to learn to remember their past lives, to know themselves as eternal aspects of the Cosmic Self…. I agree with you completely on that! And the conversion ceremonies. It’s something we’ve done ourselves in the past, and no doubt we’ll do it again: licensed group suicide in times of hardship, for the good of others. The humans themselves don’t consider it a crime. It’s all very, spiritual and uplifting, I’m sure…. But darling, I think it has to come from them. From the humans. We can’t impose belief. It won’t stick. My dear, I know you want to help. But a missionary! So banal! Is it really you?”

  He broke off to make a tart little bow to the populated air, which was carrying away the chemical trace of his opinions—to be picked up, maybe, in the wide web of the Commonalty, by a sensitive clergyperson. “No offence meant, none taken I hope. I’ve always made my views on the Mission plain.”

  “You think the whole idea is stupid and nasty,” she whimpered accusingly.

  Maitri stood in a pool of lucid gold, the dark nasal space in the center of his face contracted in helpless anxiety. He lifted his clawed hands and let them fall. “I respect your belief. But we’re so worried. You don’t seem happy, or well.”

  “You should have told me you hated the Mission when I moved out.”

  “I was afraid,” explained her guardian simply. “I was afraid of losing you.”

  She turned away, wrapping her arms more tightly around her body. “My cell was lovely,” she announced. “You’d never guess. The walls are covered in real ceramic tile, must be over three hundred years old. And roses. You’d love the roses. You should get yourself arrested; then you could see for yourself. He was so nice, the boy whose apartment we used. I wish I could remember his name. I can never remember their names.”

  Maitri was watching her with undisguised concern.

  “How long since you ate?”

  “Am I babbling? Fifth day. I’m not going on with it. There’s no point. I’m beaten.”

  “I’m glad of that,
at least. There are so many interesting drugs on this wonderful planet, if you must ruin your health. Starvation is just silly. Have you begun to hallucinate?”

  Catherine frowned sharply. “No! Not at all.”

  She began to weep, the human tears spilling from her eyes. “Maitri, I’m so sorry. I know I’ve let you down. You expected more from me. I know the Mission is stupid. But the humans are dying. We’re leaving, their world is trashed and they have nowhere to go. They can’t survive and I know it’s my fault. Can you understand how that feels?”

  “Go and lie down,” he advised gently. “Have something to eat; sleep. Let us look after you. You don’t mean these wild things, you’ll feel better soon. But I should warn you, I’m having a little reception this afternoon. One of my usual parties for the locals, it won’t disturb you.”

  She smiled feebly at his use of the dissidents’ term: the locals, meaning our neighbors, people like us. Not the humans, meaning the alien species for whom we can’t be held responsible. By such signs a world of difference is made known.

  “Do you want me on show?” The humans were very curious about Catherine. She was quite “a draw,” as Maitri vulgarly put it.

  “Not unless you’re feeling much better.” He handed her the vase, with a puzzled glance at the contents: touched her cheek with one clawed finger. “Now go and rest!”

  Her room was as she had left it, when she moved to her little rented trou in the hives. She put the vegetable bouquet on her desk, under a twentieth-century icon of the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Jesus, and a very lovely moving image, in a silver frame, of blue Krisna dancing and playing the flute. “If you were Aleutian flowers,” she said to them, “hearing you talk would almost make sense. So you see, I am not crazy.” She lay on her bed, which was a soft Aleutian pallet spread on the floor, and found the same cracks in the plaster ceiling that she had named, to console herself, when she came to live in the aliens’ part of the house. The seagull. The happy face—which had been human when she was very young, but became Aleutian after a patch of plaster fell, leaving a gap instead of a nose. The friendly spaceplane with a crooked wing. In Aleutia buildings did not fall into decay. Everything the aliens used, built, touched, was alive and part of life’s constant change and reparation. On Earth, fascinated by dead objects that stayed the same as they slowly crumbled, Aleutians let splendid mansions tumble around them, dressed themselves in old curtains, collected scraps of litter, to the disgusted astonishment of their human acquaintances.

  She closed her eyes.

  She was Lord Maitri’s human ward: but she was an Aleutian, inside. There had been no solemn moment when they told her, You are an immortal. You look like a human being, you grew in a human womb; but you are not what you seem. They’d simply taken her from her mother and treated her like an Aleutian child: giving her the possessions this person had owned in previous incarnations. Speaking to her as to the friend they’d known so intimately through so many lifetimes. They’d set her in front of moving-image records of her Aleutian past, hour by hour. The records had a biochemical content her human body could not process, a haze of living inscription that left the screen but could not penetrate her human skin. Yet one day it had come to her, exactly as if she was the immortal in the records, without a shadow of doubt, that this was herself.

  I am me. This is my history.

  She thought of the conversion. After prayer and meditation the candidates, exalted, leapt on each other. In future lives they’d be able to die like Aleutians, in a normal way, in the certain hope of return. This first time they needed the rapture. They had staggered out into the little concourse in the depths of that genteel, respectable, foul-smelling tenement offering handfuls of their blood and flesh to horrified passers-by. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. The Self is God! they cried. Die to mortality, and live forever!

  Maitri was right. The Mission was stupid, distasteful. Those idiotic faked records in which humans pretended to recall other lives! The bogus arguments, shifty false ideas. She did not like her comrades in the Church. The aloof Aleutian missionary priest who visited so seldom. The self-satisfied lay readers: long-time proselytes who were never quite ready for conversion themselves. The halfcaste deacon, so eager to condescend and patronize “Miss Catherine.” She’d told herself liking didn’t come into it. There were nowhere near as many humans as had once been predicted: there were still too many. So much living space had been lost during the Aleutian era: devastated by war, poisoned by overuse, ruined by bad, alien solutions to Earth’s problems. The numbers had to be cut back. The Church of Self Mission had seemed to offer a way. No, it is not spiritual or uplifting (she told Maitri, in her mind). We missionaries reduce the surplus population a little: nothing more. It is foul work. That’s why I wanted it.

  She was stifling. She got up and stumbled to her window, clawed at the living membrane that had taken the place of the vanished glass. The rents sealed as fast as she could make them. The air was full of tiny living things: messages her human body couldn’t read, tools she couldn’t use, servants who would not obey. She crumpled to the floor, trembling, seeing all that blood.

  Dying, falling in flames….

  She was dead and lying in a funerary room. Her body’s substance was seeping away, carried off by the tiny creatures in the air, delivered back into the common store of life. She became a desiccated skeleton, slowly crumbling. Maitri was dead, the Aleutians long gone. Catherine’s self inhabited the air of a ruin. The city buzzed over her and consumed her. She was divided into a million, million dust motes, swallowed and breathed and excreted over and over again: but still Catherine

  When she woke she was lying on the floor under the window, and the tiny servants had been busy. The room had become cool, her body was clean. The rusty rims had gone from under her nails, every tangle and burr and louse had been nursed out of her hair. As she sat up, fragments of her shoddy poor-ward clothes fell from her; immaculate dust. Someone had left a bowl of savory gruel by her bed, and laid out clean clothes: fresh underwear and a spruce suit of overalls, the dun uniform of the Aleutian Expedition on Earth.

  She dressed and drank the gruel by stages, very slowly. When she replaced the bowl, the tray stood up on little caterpillar legs, nudged her knee in farewell and trotted to the door. Catherine smiled. Since she’d moved out to the hives, she had missed Maitri’s whimsical commensals. She had missed a whole world that was alive with tenderness: full of gentle eyes, nestling touches, snuggling caresses. And yet she could feel suffocated.

  She returned to her window: she was a tiny speck in the center of Youro, one of the huge cities that spanned the surface of the giant planet. Cities in the Aleutian sense of an enclosed region of life; not an urban concentration. How closely Earth had come to resemble the homeworld! Where the cities were ecologies and outside there was only desert wilderness. “Like dogs and their owners,” she murmured.

  Within his domain Maitri preserved the old seasons, so it was midsummer noon in the flower garden under her bedroom. Red roses bowed their heavy heads; papery blue bell flowers nodded on long thin stems; speckled lilies gaped. The flowers on her desk were just as beautiful, but considered non-flowers. Leonie had said they were poisonous. Poisonous vegetables? She must have misheard. She was sure she had often eaten potatoes.

  The vague murmur of human traffic, the whole world outside and all her life in this body, seemed more transparent than the film that closed her window. A phrase came to her, one of those expressions that appears from nowhere and is suddenly repeated everywhere: the unreality of these last days. Somewhere, not all that far from here, humans and Aleutians were working to perfect a device that would annihilate space and time, the “engine” that would power the Aleutians’ return to their home planet. Her Aleutian self had played a crucial part in the adventure of discovering that longed-for means of getting home. But why should Catherine take the praise, or the blame, for that person’s actions? It’s all lies, Maitri, she thought. They
don’t return. Humans are not immortal, actually, none of us are. Already I am not the person I was last night, and this is not the same world that was then. I do not live forever; I die forever and keep on dying. She lay down on her bed, drugged by an immense lassitude. With eyes half closed she dreamed of Maitri’s garden, of the huge ruins of the Giratoire, the sigh and chatter of the human poor in their baked clay alleys and their high-piled tenement hives. She would not go back to the Mission. She would live and die in this quiet house. She would be Catherine, human ward of the alien Lord Maitri: tranquil, unimportant, unregarded. The peace of exhaustion overwhelmed her.

  When she next woke, she heard the sound of human voices. She jumped up quickly, full of good resolutions, and prepared to face the world.

  ii

  Misha Connelly turned aside before he entered the atrium, where the aliens were gathered to greet their guests, and followed a short passageway that led to the character shrine. He’d never been inside this house before in the real, but he knew the layout. If you wanted to do anything or be anyone in this city, you had to be familiar with their affairs. The shrine was large and softly murmurous. There were ritual screens, one for each member of Lord Maitri’s household (whether presently living or dead). Some of the stands were plain, some grown in ornately peculiar forms: a squatting homunculus, a mound of fungoid foliage. The predominant color in the decor was deep copper, with highlights of translucent purple. It blended well with the cobwebs in the corners and the cracks in the walls. Most of the screens were blank. A few were playing scenes from Aleutian lives, two-dimensional animations in the archaic style they reserved for their confessional histories. Bronze and silver candelabra stood about, laden with genuine wax tapers. The main presentation, our sermon for today, was shown on a virtual screen much bigger than the antique boxes on the stands. It was a passage from the life of Peenemünde Buonarotti—no doubt in compliment to the afternoon’s human guests. A forest of blue-hearted flames burned around it. Perfumed smoke rose in coils from an incense burner. Misha sat cross-legged, chin propped on one hand, head a little thrown back, golden-topaz eyes a little somber. Russet-tinged dark curls escaped from his black beret and clustered on his brow. A practiced, dandy’s gesture spread the skirts of his light overcoat to advantage. He covered his face, briefly: The Self Is God.