Carnival-SA (17 page)

Vincent went.

Angelo might
look
like the dangerous one, but that didn’t mean that Vincent had no idea how to take care of himself in a fight. He charged, zigzagging, and trusted his wardrobe to soak up any fire he didn’t dodge.

When the fire came, it wasn’t bullets. A tangler hissed at his head, but his timing was good, and his wardrobe caught it at the right angle and shunted it aside. Gelatinous tendrils curled toward him, and sparks scattered where they encountered the wardrobe and were shocked off. Two of the masked women grabbed for him as he sidestepped the tangler, and his wardrobe zapped their hands. He shoved past them as shot from a chemical weapon pattered behind him, spreading the sharp reek of gunpowder, while he twisted against grabbing hands.

Firearms echoed again, and one of the women who was clinging to his arm despite the wardrobe’s defenses jerked and fell away. Vincent shouldered the other one aside and ran. Leaving a couple of women to do his fighting for him. But they were security, and they had ordered him to clear the area.

If it had been Michelangelo, he would have done the same.

Once he reached the crowded street, he could no longer hear the footsteps behind him. He wove between clusters of merrymakers, half expecting some good Samaritan to trip him as a purse-snatcher or runaway, but it was Carnival, and other than a few turned heads, bright laughter, and a startled exclamation—no one paid him heed.

He couldn’t run for long. His head started spinning again, and he’d left his hat lying in the damp dust. He let himself drop into a jog, then a walk, sidestepping drunks and Dragon dancers and wandering musicians. The toe of his shoe dragged on the pavement and he stumbled, his wet hair steaming. But Miss Pretoria had also told him that her household was close, and Shafaqat had told him how to get there. He ducked down a side street strung with more cut flowers, past three men and five women carrying shopping bags, and stepped into the shade. “House,” he said, feeling ridiculous, although he’d waited until there was a gap in the flow of people, “show me how to get to Pretoria household.”

At first there was no reaction. But then a shimmer formed along the wall, neither an arrow nor a trace, but something like a ripple on water. It was a pale sheen of blue luminescence, dim in shadow and brighter in sunlight, and it led him further along the street he had ducked down. It didn’t take him long to realize that he wasn’t being led by the most direct route. Instead, House brought him down side streets, less populated ways, and through shadowing courtyards. It concerned him, but he didn’t know which other way to go, and so he followed. The shimmer ran along walls, or sometimes immediately underfoot, always a half-step ahead until it brought him back into sunlight on a quiet byway with only a little pedestrian traffic, not broad enough for a car. There, at the bottom of a set of broad shallow steps leading to a screened veranda, it abandoned him, vanishing into the pavement like oil dispersing on water.

He looked up the steps at the front door, which glided open. Behind it stood a young woman with Lesa’s broad cheeks but a darker complexion and curlier hair. “House said to expect you,” she said. “I’m Katya Pretoria. Come in off the street.”

That’s a bit more than a goddamned giant utility fog,
Vincent thought, but he didn’t hesitate to climb the steps.

“Your mother might need help,” he said, pausing to glance over his shoulder, back in the direction from which he’d come.

“Household security’s on the way.”

10

“MISS KUSANAGI-JONES,” MISS OUAGADOUGOU SAID AFTER he had entirely managed to lose track of the time after, “do you need to check in with your ship?”

He glanced up from sketching schematics on his watch, refocusing on Miss Ouagadougou through shimmering green lines that overlaid the physical gallery. His watch identified her as an individual rather than a part of the landscape, and backgrounded the display plan behind her. It looked odd, sandwiched between her and a Gerónima Cruz Montoya casein-on-paper painting. “Sorry?”

“It’s past teatime. And the station should be overhead in a few ticks. We’ll eat upstairs, and I thought you might—”

“Very kind,” Kusanagi-Jones said, recollecting himself. “Does this suit?”

“The schematics?” Her hair bobbed on the nape of her neck. “If you finalize them, I’ll upload them to the ministry net, and they’ll keep a crew in tonight to finish the setup. It actually works out better this way.”

“It?” He was already sealing the plans, satisfied with the exhibit. Miss Ouagadougou had a good eye.

“Lead on,” he said, before she finished fussing with her headset.

They ascended the lift in companionable silence, Miss Ouagadougou still fiddling and Kusanagi-Jones pulling up a sat-phone license on his wardrobe menu. He’d need a relay station; his watch couldn’t power orbital communication.

If he was lucky, his communication would reach
Kaiwo Maru
before she dispatched a packet-bot back to Earth to swap mail. It would still take six months to send a message and get an answer, assuming
The
Pride of Ithaca
or one of the other inbound ships was close enough to relay the bot’s signal. But at least this way the message would be in the queue.

If anything happened.

He coded two reports. The first used a standard diplomatic cipher, and detailed a strictly factual, strictly accurate report of his and Vincent’s doings since landfall. The second, concealed in the first and still largely innocuous to Coalition eyes, concerned itself with a perceived obstructionist element in New Amazonian government.

There was a third message, contained not in a discrete data stream, but in the interplay of the others. In the cracks between. Kusanagi-Jones concealed an ironic smile.

This one, of necessity brief, must be sent when Vincent wasn’t present to record it. It was sealed eyes-only, quantum coded. When Kusanagi-Jones broke the seal on his own end of the code, a quantum entanglement triggered a wave-state collapse on the other end of the system, alerting his principal that a message was en route. The only man in the universe who could read the message was the one who held the other half of the key.

That man was Siddhartha Deucalion Hunyadi Lawson-Hrothgar. He was a senior member of the Earth Coalition Cabinet. And its contents, if they
could
have fallen into the wrong hands, would have meant surplusing and execution not only for Kusanagi-Jones, but for Lawson-Hrothgar as well. Kusanagi-Jones understood Vincent’s position. The great-grandson of a Colonial Founder, the son of Captain Lexasdaughter—the most powerful head of state remaining under Coalition control—Vincent would work
within
the system, attempt to ease the Coalition’s stranglehold through diplomatic means. Kusanagi-Jones, with the assistance of a revolutionary patron, had chosen another path. Which was the thing Vincent could never be permitted to learn about New Earth, and the destruction of the starship named
Skidbladnir,
and why they had been separated: that it had happened so because Michelangelo had planned it that way.

“When you report,” Miss Ouagadougou said, as they stepped out into brilliant sunlight, “I’ll have something to add.”

Kusanagi-Jones wouldn’t show startlement. Instead, he stepped aside to give her a line of travel and fell into step behind. “Something about the plan I’d like to discuss. May I uplink the new version to your datacart?”

“Of course.” She pulled it out of her hip pack and flipped up the cover. “Password?”

He gave her one, and established a single-photon connection. The security detail hung back, just out of earshot if they spoke in level tones. New Amazonian courtesy. But there were some things you didn’t say out loud.

Green letters flashed across his vision and vanished.
The director of security is a radical,
Miss Ouagadougou said.
Get her to enlist.

Kyoto?
he asked.
That old dragon?

She’s inclined pro-Coalition. A free-maler. Claude’s a loss. Saide Austin holds her purse strings,
and Saide Austin…
He glanced at her as the text scroll hesitated. She shrugged, a slow rise of her shoulders, a quick tilt of her head. He recognized the name from the gallery. Saide Austin. More than an artist, apparently.
You’re a Coalition agent
.

Since before the war.

He wondered what they’d given her to buy her loyalty—money, access to Coalition art treasures—or if hers was an ideological treachery.

She put her hand on his arm.
I’ve imbedded an information packet in your copy of the plan
. She transmitted a code key, which he saved. “I’m starving,” she said. “It’s been hours since lunch.”

“Miss Ouagadougou?”

Kusanagi-Jones looked up. One of the agents had stepped forward. He might as well have been a shadow on the wall.

“Cathay.” Miss Ouagadougou smiled. “Problem?”

“Miss Pretoria requests you and Miss Kusanagi-Jones join her at Pretoria house.”

Cathay—Kusanagi-Jones was uncertain if it was her first name or last—smiled. “A car is waiting.”

Miss Ouagadougou wet her lips, and Kusanagi-Jones’s pulse accelerated. Problem.

“My uplink,” he said. He’d been hoping, frankly, to get another look around the galleries and see if he could find whatever passed for a power conduit. Wherever they had the power plant hidden, there had to be
wiring
. Electricity didn’t transmit itself, and he’d seen no signs of microwave receivers. Room temperature superconductors, he’d guess.

“Do it in the car,” she said, fingers closing on his wrist.

Problem. Yes, indeed.

Kii touches the cold illation machines that populate
Kaiwo Maru
’s core. They are intelligent, in
their own way, but Kii is not of interest to them. They process Kii, and ignore.
Kii contemplates, and the Consent observes. There is no determination yet, as Kii analyzes the
Governors’ decision trees. The Governors are aware. They are adaptive. They are goal driven,
and they are improvisational.

But their entire purpose, Kii soon understands, is the maintenance of the encroaching bipeds. They
are a predator. A constructed predator, a coolly designed one. They exist to assure the bipeds do
not overburden their habitat. They are ruthless and implacable, and their disregard for Kii is not
founded on a lack of intelligence or awareness. Rather, Kii is external to their parameters. Their
only interest is the bipeds. They are created creatures, as Kii is a created creature, a program
contained in a virtual shell. But unlike Kii, they are not alive.
They are not
esthelich
. They are not alive. In this fragment, Consent is reached with ease.

Vincent shouldn’t have been so relieved that it was Robert who took charge of him once they were inside. It was unprofessional. But for all his size, scars, and shaven head, the big man was a calming presence, revealing no threat-registers. It was the easy kind of personality that deservedly confident, competent, unthreatened people projected, and Vincent really was not feeling well at all. He let Robert bring him into the cool depths of the house, under more of those swags of dead flowers, and show him into the fresher. Or…make one for him. Now that he was watching for it, he could see how it worked, the way the building anticipated and fulfilled requests. A limited teachable AI, at least, if not sentient. The city was not so much haunted as programmed.

“Take off your shirt,” Robert said as the door irised shut behind them. He reached to grab cloth, and Vincent, who hadn’t dialed his wardrobe down, stepped back fast and tilted his chin up to look Robert in the eye. White teeth shone in contrast to Robert’s plum-colored lips, and Vincent sighed.

“No,” Robert said. “That’s not a proposition.”

Vincent knew. There was no erotic interest at all, either predatory or friendly. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Robert backed off, and Vincent touched his wrist and made his wardrobe vanish, dialing down the protection, too. He turned, showing Robert his back, and bit his lip not to shiver away when Robert reached out, slowly, making sure Vincent could see him in the mirror as he paused his hand a centimeter from Vincent’s shoulder blade. The heat of his palm made Vincent flinch; when Robert drew his hand back, he scrubbed it against his vest as if to rub the radiant warmth away. “That’s going to blister. Have you ever had a sunburn?”

“No,” Vincent said.

“You’ll feel nauseated, achy, tired. You’ll experience chills. House, some burn cream, please? Miss Katherinessen, into the shower. Cold water will help. Essentially, you’re experiencing a mild radiation burn.”

“I’ve had those,” Vincent said. His watch would handle the worst of it: he could manage his chemistry to alleviate the flulike symptoms, and his licenses included both powerful painkillers and topical analgesics. Another aperture expanded before him, leading him into a smaller chamber. He ducked through, stepping over the ridge while it was still opening, and sniffed hard. The pull of raw skin across his back and thighs was an unsubtle reminder toward caution. He paused a moment, giving his wardrobe enough time to collect its foglets so they wouldn’t wash away. There were no controls in the stall and no obvious showerhead.

“House,” he said, experimentally, as the aperture closed between him and Robert. “Cool water, please.”

It pattered on his head like rain.

Once Miss Ouagadougou had ascertained that Vincent was well, Kusanagi-Jones breathed a sigh of relief and set about working out how to adapt his watch to the car’s hub. He’d have to piggyback on its signal, which meant all the more opportunities for the transmission to be intercepted, but it wasn’t as if there were a secure channel on the entire damned planet. You closed your eyes and put your trust in cryptography.

He sent the message with Miss Ouagadougou’s addendum, unlinked, and sat back against the upholstery. Cloth rather than leather. He permitted himself to sag into it. “What happened?”

In spare details, Cathay told him. “Miss Pretoria?” he interrupted, when she paused to draw a breath.