Free Phoenix Café by Gwyneth Jones
Authors: Gwyneth Jones
row of hard seats-with-legs. Their chairs were indeed marked, in symbols and in printed English, “Reserved for Our Aleutian Friends.” This time (to Vijaya’s disappointment) the signs were mere rag-card. Maitri rose to the occasion, answering the stewards in the same expansive style.
“So much for discretion!” he muttered, sitting by Catherine and arranging the folds of his sleeveless robe. He did not seem displeased. He was wearing scarlet, a sober industrial color he’d thought suitable for the occasion. “I don’t think I’ve caused such a friendly stir among the humans since First Contact. Aren’t the chairs lovely!”
Venues licensed for in-person speakers were small and few. The status of articulate speech in Aleutian society made the aliens nervous about human demagogues: especially in Youro, always the most recalcitrant region of Old Earth. Catherine noticed that this hall was not only small but unnaturally bare. Generated-image décor was cheap and universal, yet these faded plaster walls were naked. Niches around the nave, which should have held either actual statues or the economical virtual-image version, held only strange, draggled bunches of leaves and flowers. The church seating had been rearranged, in a pattern that had not been current on Earth for three hundred years: rows that faced ahead towards a makeshift dais. A tall public address screen stood at the back of this dais, a row of hard chairs in front of it faced a simple upright lectern; and the audience. The screen was blank, and there was no draggled decoration up there. One of the stewards scurried up to the end of the aliens’ row, bearing an armful of small machines.
“Transcripters.” He spoke in French, then remembered and waved his arms. He scooted off, and returned a moment later.
Maitri beamed. “You speak very good Aleutian, young man.”
“I’m a woman, actually. But thanks anyway.”
Catherine, having looked in vain for the arts and crafts (unless those bunches of leaves counted for something), settled to contemplate Buonarotti’s miracle. Buonarotti had bemused the First Contact world by insisting there’s no such thing as alien intelligence. She hadn’t meant the aliens were fakes. Intelligent creatures may take on different bodily forms. (Peenemünde had once confessed that she’d hoped the first extraterrestrials to arrive would resemble octopuses. She liked octopuses). Cultures may vary. But a few simple, logical and mechanical laws will shape life wherever it arises: driving through evolution on every fractal scale, from slime molds to party-politics. Thought and feeling will be formed everywhere by the same pressures that created them on earth. Intelligence cannot be alien…. And here was the proof. Every human in this crowded hall was chattering away in a language the Aleutians understood (and misunderstood) as confidently as they would the Common Tongue of a different Brood at home. Unfortunately, since humans were addicted to the Spoken Word and ignored what they dismissed as an “animal” mode of communication, most of them didn’t care what they said in Silence.
They shouldn’t have been allowed in. What are they doing here? Well, I’ve seen them. That’s something to tell the grandchildren. Wonder if I could touch one? They make me feel sick, they’re dirty, they’re filling the air with their mucky bugs. They make me feel as if things are crawling on me. Are they really going to leave? Just vanish, the way they came? I don’t believe it. I wonder what they look like naked. They wear nappies instead of going to the toilet, they have little creatures bred specially to wipe their bottoms: how
“So much for discretion!” he muttered, sitting by Catherine and arranging the folds of his sleeveless robe. He did not seem displeased. He was wearing scarlet, a sober industrial color he’d thought suitable for the occasion. “I don’t think I’ve caused such a friendly stir among the humans since First Contact. Aren’t the chairs lovely!”
Venues licensed for in-person speakers were small and few. The status of articulate speech in Aleutian society made the aliens nervous about human demagogues: especially in Youro, always the most recalcitrant region of Old Earth. Catherine noticed that this hall was not only small but unnaturally bare. Generated-image décor was cheap and universal, yet these faded plaster walls were naked. Niches around the nave, which should have held either actual statues or the economical virtual-image version, held only strange, draggled bunches of leaves and flowers. The church seating had been rearranged, in a pattern that had not been current on Earth for three hundred years: rows that faced ahead towards a makeshift dais. A tall public address screen stood at the back of this dais, a row of hard chairs in front of it faced a simple upright lectern; and the audience. The screen was blank, and there was no draggled decoration up there. One of the stewards scurried up to the end of the aliens’ row, bearing an armful of small machines.
“Transcripters.” He spoke in French, then remembered and waved his arms.
Maitri beamed. “You speak very good Aleutian, young man.”
“I’m a woman, actually. But thanks anyway.”
Catherine, having looked in vain for the arts and crafts (unless those bunches of leaves counted for something), settled to contemplate Buonarotti’s miracle. Buonarotti had bemused the First Contact world by insisting there’s no such thing as alien intelligence. She hadn’t meant the aliens were fakes. Intelligent creatures may take on different bodily forms. (Peenemünde had once confessed that she’d hoped the first extraterrestrials to arrive would resemble octopuses. She liked octopuses). Cultures may vary. But a few simple, logical and mechanical laws will shape life wherever it arises: driving through evolution on every fractal scale, from slime molds to party-politics. Thought and feeling will be formed everywhere by the same pressures that created them on earth. Intelligence cannot be alien…. And here was the proof. Every human in this crowded hall was chattering away in a language the Aleutians understood (and misunderstood) as confidently as they would the Common Tongue of a different Brood at home. Unfortunately, since humans were addicted to the Spoken Word and ignored what they dismissed as an “animal” mode of communication, most of them didn’t care what they said in Silence.
They shouldn’t have been allowed in. What are they doing here? Well, I’ve seen them. That’s something to tell the grandchildren. Wonder if I could touch one? They make me feel sick, they’re dirty, they’re filling the air with their mucky bugs. They make me feel as if things are crawling on me. Are they really going to leave? Just vanish, the way they came? I don’t believe it. I wonder what they look like naked. They wear nappies instead of going to the toilet, they have little creatures bred specially to wipe their bottoms: how
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