Phoenix Café by Gwyneth Jones Read Free Book Online

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    iii
    Late in the evening, Misha’s friends arrived at the Connelly town house. The house was large, the lower floors in the possession of various Connelly tenants and subtenants. The rooms allotted to Misha, high up, above the apartment that Helen shared with their father when the family was in town, were private territory. He was allowed to let his imagination run free, and was always in the middle of a new creation. Nothing you saw or touched could be trusted.
    He had changed his clothes; exchanging the vat-grown overalls he’d worn at the party for a similar outfit, cut and stitched from mechanically woven Old Earth cloth. His friends wore tee-shirts and jeans. Misha couldn’t bring himself to adopt the full, embarrassing native costume: he excused himself by explaining that he, at least, was not afraid of the aliens, and therefore he didn’t have to be slavish about avoiding their fashions. His friends knew he was lying. But they were tolerant of Misha’s vanity, and the slippery nature of his political commitment. He was their leader.
    “What was she like?” they demanded.
    Mâtho, the shy and solemn one, a Traditionalist but by no means a gilded youth, was the son of a struggling newsagent. Rajath the halfcaste had no affiliation, not even to his own kind, and not the slightest hope of being on an alien lord’s guest list. Joset “the politician” was of Michael’s monied class, but a Reformer, whose formidable female relatives were no longer accepting invitations to Lord Maitri’s “at homes.”
    “Why is it called an ‘at home’?” Mâtho wanted to know.
    He was a small, round shouldered individual with a large nose and a wide-pored caramel colored skin. His big eyes seemed stretched out of shape by the hours he spent at the screen, splicing and blending by hand footage gleaned from the leavings of more prosperous newshandlers. His question was serious. He spent his hungry leisure studying obscure informational byways, hunting out the tiny details that would be needed to rebuild a world. “L-lord Maitri was a-at home, but no one else was. Except the other aliens in his household, I mean. So why at-at-at home? Shouldn’t ‘at home’ mean a p-party where people stay at home and meet in the datasphere?”
    “I have no idea.” Michael poured lime-flavored water for them, and rinsed his own mouth again: the soapy taste of the buffet lingered. Maitri’s cook might be human, but the air in the aliens’ kitchen was irremediably tainted.
    He was receiving his friends in his bedroom, which was at present fitted with invisible furniture and apparently walled and floored in clear glass. He threw himself carelessly onto his bed, stretched his arms above his head, rolled onto his belly and lay like a diver suspended, gazing down at a landscape of roofs and towers and chasms that lapped to the rim of a dusky horizon.
    “I couldn’t care less what Maitri calls his parties. I met her, oh brothers in the struggle. We talked, intimately. We were alone together for hours.”
    “Alone where?” demanded Rajath. “How could you be alone?”
    “In the garden.”
    The three friends pressed around Misha’s couch, as if they wanted to lick the news out of him, like Aleutian courtiers supping on their prince.
    “Did you ask her for sex?” Mâtho groaned aloud and rolled his eyes.
    “Did you take her,” demanded Joset with a sarcastic grin. “There, among the strange flowers, in the wild urgency of your mutual passion?”
    Misha floated, freefall above the abyss. “She’s one of those women who exudes the scent of come, as the aliens exude their wriggling information cells. The hot, sticky smell of sex fills the air around her. You know as soon as you see her move, as soon as the chemical breath of her mingles with the taste of your skin, that fucking her will be an experience of fabulous, sensual savagery.”
    “Does she have a good figure?” lisped Rajath.
    The halfcastes had long ago dedicated