Read Online Phoenix Café by Gwyneth Jones - Free Book Online Page A

mind and body, what you had become, through the accumulation of lives: but it was character study alone that gave you that sense of knowing you were the person who had lived before. Many people, including Maitri, romantic and old-fashioned, did not share this view. He could not shake off the feeling that “Catherine” really ought to remember going home: such an extraordinarily significant act. The fact that she did not made him afraid the conversion into human form had done his lord some awful harm.
    Everybody forgets shocking things, from time to time; everybody has to rely on other people’s records—
    But if only she would consent to pretend a little. The Third Captain certainly had made the incredible journey: there had been eye-witnesses, there was “information system” evidence derived from his body; when he’d returned, on the point of death, from his trip through the void. Why couldn’t Maitri’s ward make the record people wanted, how lovely it was to see Home again, how welcoming the air? If she would do that, Aleutia would have to listen. Instead, her honesty allowed Sattva to dismiss her, without openly doubting her identity. We hope the Third Captain will suffer no lasting ill effects.
    Maitri ought not to be so helpless. He ought to know how to manage her; it wasn’t the first time he’d been in this position! But every child is different: and always the same Clavel! Trying so earnestly to do right, helplessly doing wrong instead. Like everyone else (except those lucky rascals whose obligation was not to care!); but unlike everyone else he refused to be forgiven; or to forget. He always had to pay, he insisted on setting the accounts straight.
    Always had to pay.
    Maitri levered himself away from the wall. It made his nasal ache to think about “reproductive tracts” and “information systems.” In the old days nobody had been interested in science. How it used to make Kumbva mad! Now the air was full of chatter about the Buonarotti Device, the Multi-Realities problem, and other obscure puzzles. Maitri felt like an old dullard. How we’ve changed, he thought. It’s going to take us lives and lives to get back to normal, afterwards.
    So many friends were not around, this last generation. Kumbva the engineer. Rajath the trickster, First Captain: the unscrupulous individual who had the idea of making landfall in the first place. Aditya the Beauty. Dear Bella, and funny old Sid. The Landing Parties cluster had dispersed, maybe never to be born together again. Maybe it was just as well. Some of the others might have been tempted to do something outrageous about the way the end of the adventure was being handled: if it was only to chuck a spannet in the works. Luckily for them, the Expedition’s current backers only had to deal with ineffectual Maitri, and a poor mad local girl who held the soul of that stiff-necked person who will never use his own power.
    Those delightful phrases, he thought sadly, (retreating from his fencing match with Aleutia-in-the-Mind, before he got himself into trouble). No one uses them anymore. You probably wouldn’t find a human in this city who could remember what a spannet was. They didn’t watch the movies, they didn’t follow the news. There was nothing but interactive sport and those dreadful virtuality games: art without an audience. What’s the use of art without an audience?
    Maitri’s eyes brimmed with tears, Aleutian tears that blurred his vision but did not fall. Some of his best friends were Reformers. What would become of them after Aleutia had gone?
    “The poor devils,” he muttered aloud. “Oh, the poor devils.”
    The Monet robe felt heavy: the corridors in this house got longer every day. He bent forwards, his hands curling into paws. The tired body wanted to trot on all fours. But respect for the stolen beauty of the waterlilies kept him upright.
    iii
    The meeting hall was in a Reformer neighborhood, which caused Lord Maitri’s party some