Free Phoenix Café by Gwyneth Jones Page A

revolting.
    Maitri’s retainers were veterans. They’d either lived on Earth before, or been schooled by those who had: they were almost as indifferent to the legendary rudeness as if they were human themselves. Beside Catherine, Atha, Maitri’s kind-hearted cook, picked a claw full of squirming red life from the pores in his throat, and offered it to Vijay. This is me my dear, this is how I feel, this is how things are with me just now. Vijaya accepted the gift affectionately. A wave of intensified disgust burst from his human neighbors. Atha looked about him, wondering silently:
    Catherine giggled. People in dull green overalls, with the bright green stewards’ armbands, marched onto the packing-case dais. The crowd came to attention. The stewards retired, a single figure approached the lectern.
    Lalith the halfcaste presented as feminine, though not female. She had the moderate prenatal transformation: nostril slits and a cleft lip rather than a fully open nasal. She was sturdily built, her skin tone an average rosy-brown. She launched into some general remarks about peace, love and the work ethic.
    Catherine prepared to be bored. She wondered if Misha Connelly could possibly be interested in this sort of thing.
    “None of us can forget the Gender War. It has shaped our lives. It has shaped the state of our planet, as much if not more than the Aleutians—”
    Lord Maitri’s people started, and the Silent touched their lord in furtive chemical reproach. Lalith’s odd noises could not distract them from her perfectly intelligible Silence. they insisted, outraged.
    “But how much of the rest of human history do we remember? I am, as you can see, a halfcaste. You may wonder why, if the Renaissance seeks a way forward that’s beyond gender, I remain gendered as a member of the third sex. It’s because I’m proud of the halfcaste tradition. When the Aleutians arrived, some three hundred years ago, they were welcomed, almost worshiped. Some wanted so desperately to be like these angels from outer space that they altered their bodies by crude surgery: became sexless, silent, noseless. It was childish of course. But they also adopted the Aleutian practice of studying the records. Halfcastes study the records for the same reason as the Aleutians do. They believe that they can identify their former incarnations in moving-image records of the past and thereby ‘learn to be themselves.’ Although I respect that belief, I do not share it. I study the records not as an individual but as a citizen of humanity. It is not myself that I find there, it is humanity’s Self. We have forgotten our past. We have forgotten our own resources. We play the games, which have no history. We ought to be making movies, talk-shows, science programs. We ought to be analyzing our archives. The Aleutians are the lords of life. But they build and preserve their cultural identity through the artificial records made by the Priests of Self—a mass of data to which every Aleutian, rich or poor, famous or obscure, makes a contribution. Why have we given up our own history, if the Aleutians value history so much? We’ve become dependent on their biotechnology, their skill at altering our landscapes, at generating tailored hybrids so much superior to our original crops, animals, machines. But we had our own life sciences once. We can recover them. We can build our own customized world.”
    Lalith paused, sweeping the crowd with a practiced, in-gathering glance.
    “Once, we believed that the Aleutians were divine. Today we know that they don’t live forever, and they cannot read our minds. When they arrived they were shipwrecked adventurers, their asteroid-mothership lost in space. Soon they will return to their home planet, using the invention of a human physicist. They will go in peace. But when the