Carnival-SA (12 page)

But that had been before Kusanagi-Jones learned just how badly he’d screw Vincent over, when it came down to orders. And not even official orders.

No. Orders on behalf of Free Earth, in opposition to the Cabinet.

Angel walks beside giants. The nearest is warm and smells sour, sweat and fear, but under the scent is the warmth and the familiar spices of home. Mama holds his hand to keep him close, but it isn’t needed; you couldn’t pry him from her side.

Her palm is cold and wet, and her hand is shaking. She calls him
On-hel,
like she did, a pretty nickname. She shushes him. They come into a bright room and she picks him up, swings him off his feet and holds him close. Not balanced on her hip, but pressed to her chest, as if she can hide him in the folds of her wardrobe.

Someone says big words, words he doesn’t understand. They boom, amplified. They hurt his ears, and he hides his head in Mama’s breast. She cups a big palm against the back of his head, covering his ears, making the hurt go away. He knows not to cry out loud. He curls up tight. Mama argues. Her arm around him is tight. But then someone else speaks. He says
they won’t take the
boy,
and Mama staggers, as if someone has struck her a blow, and when he looks up she’s swaying with her eyes closed. “The boy is not to blame,” the man says, the man Angel’s never seen before. “The Governors say, let the punishment fit the crime.”

Then someone pulls Angel away from her, and she lets him go as if her arm has numbed. She turns away, her round brown face contracted. She seems caught midflinch.

He cries her name and reaches for her, but somebody has him, big arms and a confused moment of struggling against strength. He kicks. He’d bite, but whoever has him is wise to that trick. He’s held tight.

“Close your eyes, Angel,” Mama says, but he doesn’t listen. She’s not looking at him. He dreams his name the way she said it again, the fond short form nobody else has ever called him. Whoever’s holding him says something, some words, but he’s screaming too loud to hear them, and then Mama takes a deep breath and nods, and there’s a pause, long enough that she opens her eyes and turns as if to see why what she was anticipating has not come to pass—

—and she falls apart.

She makes no sound. She doesn’t show pain or even squeak; the Governors are programmed to be humane. But one moment she is whole and alive and letting out a held breath and taking in another one to speak to him, and the next she pitches forward, boneless, her central nervous system disassembled. Within moments, the thing that was Angel’s Mama is a crumbling dune in the middle of a broad white empty floor, and the man who is holding him, too late, thinks to step back and turn Angel’s face away. He already knows not to cry out loud. He couldn’t, anyway, because his breath won’t move. The adult holding him soothes him, strokes him, but hesitates when he seems to feel no emotion. He wasn’t too worried, the adult Kusanagi-Jones understands. The boy was too young to understand what he’d seen, most likely. And everywhere, there are families that want children and are not permitted to have them.

Someone will take him in.

Angelo’s breathing awoke Vincent in the darkness. It was not slow and deep, but a staccato rhythm that Vincent had almost forgotten in the intervening years, and now remembered as if it were merely hours since the last time he lay down beside Michelangelo.

Angelo was a lucid dreamer. He had learned the trick in self-defense, with Vincent’s assistance, decades before. Angelo could control his dreams as easily as he controlled his emotions. Just more irony that it turned out not to help the problem.

Because it didn’t stop the nightmares.

Vincent had hoped, half-consciously, they might have eased over the passing years. But judging from Angelo’s rigid form in the bed, his fists clenched against his chest, his frozen silhouette and panting as if he bit back panicked sobs—

—they were worse.

“Angelo,” he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM

atonia—the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain—and waking.

“Angelo,”
Vincent snapped, bouncing the bed in preference to the dangerous activity of shaking his partner.

Angelo’s eyelids popped open, dark irises gleaming with reflected colors. He gasped and pushed his head back against the pillow, sucking air as if he’d been dreaming of being strangled. He might have been. All Vincent knew about the nightmares was that they were of things that had happened, or might have happened, and between them they had enough unpleasant memories for a year’s worth of bad dreams.

Vincent put his hand on Angelo’s shoulder; when he breathed out again he seemed calm. “Thank you,”

he said. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

“Think nothing of it,” Vincent answered, and put his head down on the pillow again.

Lesa sat cross-legged on the bed, a cup of tea steaming in her hands, her breakfast untouched on the tray beside her, and watched the Coalition diplomats disentangle themselves from the sheets. She had a parser-translator running on their coded conversation of the night before, but it hadn’t been able to identify the language. It
had
tossed out some possibles, based on cognates, but its inability to provide a complete translation was frustrating. It could put together a word here, a word there—Katherinessen, laughing, calling Kusanagi-Jones a
son-of-a-bitch
in plain Ozglish, not even com-pat—and she got a sense that they were talking about personal history, some old hurt or illness that was tied to the hesitations in their sex.

Just the sort of thing you’d expect recently reunited long-term lovers to discuss when they were safe under the covers, warm in each other’s arms. But something tugged her attention, something she couldn’t quite call an irregularity, but an…eccentricity. They were together, but strained—by history, she thought, secrets, and maybe the mission itself.

She smiled, watching Katherinessen unwind himself from the bed and pad across the carpetplant to the window, where some delicate tool rested in the sun, dripping tiny solar panels like the black leaves of an unlikely orchid.

Secrets. Of course, Katherinessen
was
keeping secrets.

He rested his arm on the window ledge, squinting in the sunlight, and began to fuss with the interface on his implant. Recharging its battery, she realized, after a moment. Clever—and she thought it might have a system to capture the kinetic energy of his body when he moved. Meanwhile Kusanagi-Jones checked something on his own implant, then stood and glided toward the bathroom. She shook herself free of her urge to watch him go about his morning routine; he wasn’t as pretty as Katherinessen, but he moved like a khir, all coiled muscle and liquid strength. Instead she stood, drank off her tea—kept hot by the mug—and clicked her fingers for Walter. The khir poked its head from the basket beside the door and stretched regally, long scale-dappled legs flexing nonretractable claws among the carpetplant. Its earfeathers flickered forward and up, trembling like the fronds of a fern, and when it shook itself, dust motes and shreds of fluff scattered into the sunlight like glitter.

Lesa snapped her fingers again and crouched, holding out a piece of her scone. Walter trotted to her, dancing in pleasure at being offered a share of breakfast. It inspected the scone with nostrils and labial pits, then took it daintily between hooked teeth as long as Lesa’s final finger-joint. She dusted the crumbs off the khir’s facial feathers, and it chirped, dropping more bits on the carpetplant. Standing, its nose was level with hers when she crouched.

She bumped its forehead with her hand, petting for a moment as it leaned into her touch, then stood and walked toward the fresher. The door irised into existence; the shower created itself around her. She hurried. She had things to accomplish before the repatriation, and it
was
the first of Carnival.

Vincent sat on the window ledge, wearing the simplest loose trousers and shirt he had licensed. He sweated under them, the rising sun warming the moist air on his back. His face and chest were cool; his body was breaking the air curtain, but it didn’t seem to disrupt the climate control.

“Angelo,” he called, loud enough to be heard over running water, “do you get the feeling we’re being watched?”

Michelangelo’s voice drifted over splashing. “Expect we wouldn’t be?”

Silly question, sarcastic answer, of course. But there was something picking at the edge of his senses. Something more than the knowledge that there were video and audio motes turned on them every moment. More unsettling than the knowledge that somewhere, a technician was dissecting last night’s lovemaking via infrared and voice-stress.

Vincent frowned, imagining too vividly the expression on some cold-handed woman’s face as she analyzed the catch in Michelangelo’s breath when he’d finally consented to thrust up into Vincent with that particular savagery. It was rare that Angelo allowed glimpses of the man under his armor. And Vincent worked for them, he did. He always had.

“Such a gentleman,” he called back as the water cut off, filing the shiver at the nape of his neck under
deal with it later
. The Penthesileans said their city was haunted, and Vincent did not wonder why. It wasn’t just the wind or the trembling in the walls when you brushed them with your hand. Sound carried in these arched, airy chambers. Vincent’s first reaction was that they would be prohibitive to heat. Of course, that didn’t mean much at the equator, and they
would
catch a breeze—but these were people so energy-rich they let the tropical sunshine splash on their streets and skins unfiltered by solar arrays, like letting gold run molten down the gutters, uncollected. He thought of Old Earth, her Governors and her painstakingly, ruthlessly balanced ecology, and sighed. If generating power were removed from the equation, that would leave agriculture and resources as the biggest impactors, and a utility fog was a very efficient use of material. One object, transfinite functions. Michelangelo stepped out of the shower, making it Vincent’s turn. Their wardrobes could handle sweat and body odor, but bacterial growth and skin oil were beyond them. Besides, Vincent had an uneasy suspicion he was getting hooked on warm water flooding over his body. It was a remarkable sensation. He kissed Michelangelo in passing, and keyed his wardrobe off before he stepped under the shower. Michelangelo would start complaining about the clothes Vincent had chosen for him soon enough, and then, if they hurried, they could make it to the docks and check out the cargo before their command appearance at breakfast and the repatriation ceremony.

“Angelo—” Hot water sluiced across Vincent’s neck, easing discomfort he hadn’t noticed. He checked his chemistry. He could afford an analgesic. And a mild stimulant. Something to tide him over until breakfast, where he hoped there would be coffee.

“Here.” He was in the fresher, his voice pitched soft and echoing slightly off the mirror as if he were leaned in close.

“I need an Advocate.”

Michelangelo’s silence was indulgence.

Vincent listened to the water fall for thirty seconds, and then said, “Kyoto. She never got to say her piece at dinner.”

“The terrifying old battleaxe? What topic?”

“Biological determinism. Can you do it?”

“Right.” Michelangelo cleared his throat. “The only significant natural predator that human women have is heterosexual men. The Amazonian social structure, with its strictures on male activity, has nothing to do with masculine intelligence or capability.”

“Good.” Vincent started to key a toiletry license, and saw a bar of soap resting in a niche in the wall. “Do you suppose this soap is animal fat?”

“Probably,” Michelangelo said, dropping his cheerfully didactic voice of Advocacy. “How’s it smell?”

“Nice.” But Vincent, having sniffed, put it down again and ran his hand under the water until his skin tingled. “So if it’s not that men suffer under reduced capacity, what’s it about?”

“Biology. Self-defense. Reasonable precautions.”

“Keep going.”

“Traditionally, the responsibility for safety falls on the victim. Women are expected to defend themselves from predators. To act like responsible prey. Limit risks, not take chances. Not to go out alone at night. Not talk to strange men. Rely on their own, presumably domesticated men for protection from other feral men—in exchange for granting them property rights over the women in question.” He laughed. “How’s that?”

“And the New Amazonian system is superior in what way?”

“Punishes the potential predator and arms the potential victim. If men cannot control themselves, control will be instituted. Potential predators are caged, regulated.”

“But?”

Michelangelo fell silent again. Vincent heard the splash of water, the rustle of the towels. “What do I think, or what would Elder Kyoto say?”

“Kyoto.”

“It could have happened centuries ago, but women were soft,” Michelangelo said. “Too soft for revolution. Too willing to believe the best of men. Unwilling to punish all for the sins of many, so they took that onus on themselves, and endured the risks. And a certain percentage of human males acted the way some males of most species will act: infanticide, rape, kidnapping, and the general treatment of females as chattel.”

“And what do
you
think?”

More quiet. The water cut off.

Vincent ducked his head out of the shower without rinsing the soap from his hair. “Angelo?”

Michelangelo was leaned against the wall, palms on either side of the mirror, inspecting the whites of his eyes. He turned around and set his backside on the basin between pale-knuckled hands. “Think we’re all prey. And all predators, given half a chance. What about you?”

After a certain amount of trouble, Kii accesses the spaceship. Timeslip reveals emergent
properties; the ship is named
Kaiwo Maru,
and
Kaiwo Maru
will have been important to the
resolution, eventually. The threads lead through her, swirl around her. They are altered when they
cross her path, and tumble away in alien directions.