Read Online Phoenix Café by Gwyneth Jones - Free Book Online

we could go back and start again. But we can’t. And really, deep down, we consent, you and I: Aleutia consents to the way the Departure is to be handled. We can’t stay. We must leave, and they must work things out entirely for themselves. There’s no sane alternative.”
    “Perhaps people like you and I should be nicer to Sattva and his backers,” suggested Catherine, not too seriously. “Remember what you always used to say? Praise is the first rule of good management.”
    “I’ve changed my mind about that. Communication is the first rule. When you can’t communicate, nothing else follows. No, there’s nothing to be done. But I wish I could stop you from blaming yourself. You aren’t responsible for the whole Expedition’s misdeeds.”
    “I can’t help my obligation,” she murmured, invoking a favorite Aleutian platitude. “It’s the way I’m made, the way the chemicals are put together.”
    Maitri turned from the flowers to smile at her sadly. “And so we call you ‘the conscience of Aleutia.’ Poor Catherine; what a thankless talent. But I do wonder what it means,” he added bitterly, “when people insist that their voice of conscience is crazy…. I’m so sorry my dear. I rushed to rescue you from a nightmare and I seem to be trying to give you another one. I had a better reason for interrupting your siesta. I’ve thought of an outing you might enjoy.”
    “Another sweet young lady?” Catherine felt that her introduction to Thérèse Khan had not been a success.
    “No, no! Something very different. A political meeting.”
    “I thought we weren’t supposed to get involved in their politics.”
    Catherine’s tone was dry. Maitri answered it with equal irony.
    “I should have said, a non political meeting.” He adopted a tone of artless enthusiasm. “If you hadn’t been burying yourself in the Church of Self, you couldn’t help but know about the ‘Renaissance.’ It’s an aesthetic regeneration, a renewal of the old human arts and crafts, music and cuisine and such like, from Pre-Contact times. It’s been around for years, in the avant-garde. Now it’s been discovered, and it’s everywhere. One of the leaders, Lalith the halfcaste, is in Youro making an in-person tour. It sounds very exciting and attractive, and since it’s strictly non-gender biased, there’s no harm in our going along.”
    
    Maitri shrugged innocently. “Well, what about it? I believe Michael Connelly—the younger, that is—is sure to be there.”
     
    On his way back through the house, Maitri stopped for a rest: pretending to the household that he had halted to admire the decayed paintwork. He meant to compose himself, putting on a cheerful, confident face for the others. Instead he started worrying, not about “Catherine” (a name meaning The Pure, in Youro local language) but about the person Catherine was.
    The Aleutians were truly “serial immortals,” not just physically reborn. The scraps of life in the air, the “wandering cells” exuded and consumed, were part of a system that kept the embryonic model of the entire Brood (held in each individual’s reproductive tract) constantly updated. Everything that happened to you in any life: your happiness, your sufferings, the development of your obligatory skills; anything that had a bio-chemical signature, was recorded in your proto-embryo, and became part of your self. Kumbva the engineer, the Second Captain of the original expedition, said the live-tissue system (as opposed to “dead” or “inert” tissue of blood, bones, entrails), stood in place of human sexual fusion, as the Aleutian mechanism of evolution. Apparently this “disseminated consciousness” was crucial to the success of Buonarotti project: which a human had invented, but which humans could not use.
    Rationalists (Kumbva among them) dismissed the idea that self-conscious memories could be inherited. You truly were, in