Phoenix Café Read Free

she was a child she used to think that the water-daemon was trapped, begging to be let out. She would try to catch it and help it over the side. But the water flowed through her fingers and just went on crying.
    The air had a slight haze in it, enough to blur the vista of Maitri’s lawns and flowers. At First Contact, human observers had noticed straight away that the aliens communicated “like animals.” It was true that a chatty gathering of Aleutians could look like a troupe of baboons in clothes, silently embracing, grooming, nuzzling; conversing by gaze and gesture—with the occasional startling outburst of articulate speech. It had taken longer before the humans realized that Aleutians were also in constant, biochemical communication: through tiny particles exchanged in the air they breathed, and absorbed through their pores; through the wriggling scraps of skin fauna that they picked from each other and ate. Like almost every animal on earth—except for humans—they lived in a broth of tastes and smells that kept them always in contact with each other. But in the aliens’ case the traffic was conscious.
    It was this living, intelligent flux, thick and complex as commerce on the lifeless human information networks, that had destroyed human supremacy. It was the basis of the aliens’ effortless biotechnology.
    The Aleutians were like animals: animals who had attained spacefaring civilization while still possessing and developing their most ancient animal traits. Controlled biochemical processing—a technology the humans had just begun to develop when the aliens arrived—was their element. They had conquered, like the tiger weed, not because they were different, but because they were like enough to compete. Meanwhile the extraordinary human technologies, their weird dead machines, their occult control over the forces of the void— electrons, photons —had fallen into neglect, reserved for games and toys. Artworks. Such irony! It was as if the people of Earth had taken a convoluted wrong turning, and arrived back on the right track just a little too late. Aleutians and the humans had met as equals. Who would believe that today?
    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