Carnival-SA (2 page)

That would make things easier.”

Michelangelo shrugged, impassive. Vincent turned, now watching him frankly, and wondered how much of the attraction was—had always been—that Michelangelo was one of the few people he’d met that he
couldn’t
read like a fiche.

“They offered me a choice. Therapy or forced retirement.”

Michelangelo’s coloring was too dark for his face to pale, but the blood draining made him ashen. “You took therapy.”

Vincent stifled a vindictive impulse. “I took retirement. I don’t consider my sexuality something that needs to be
fixed
.”

“Sign of persistent pathology,” Michelangelo said lightly, but his hands trembled.

“So I’ve been told. The funny thing is, they couldn’t make it stick. I didn’t even make it home before I was recalled. Apparently I’m indispensable.”

Michelangelo’s thumb moved across his inner wrist, giving Vincent a sympathetic shiver at the imagined texture of the skin. Another glass appeared in the dispensall, but from the smell, this one was fruit juice. He sipped the juice and made a face. “I heard.”

Vincent wondered if the license was off. “And you?”

“Not as indispensable as Vincent Katherinessen.” He put the glass back and watched as it recycled: the drink vaporizing, the glass fogging. A waste of energy; Vincent controlled the urge to lecture. If they got what they needed on New Amazonia, it wouldn’t be an issue—and anyway, they were on a starship, the one place in the entire OECC where conserving energy wasn’t a civic duty as mandated as community service. “I took the therapy.”

Vincent swallowed, wishing he could taste something other than the tang of atomizing juice. He picked a nonexistent bit of lint off his sleeve. “Oh.”

Michelangelo lifted his chin, turned, and gave Vincent a smile warm enough to melt his implants. He glanced over his shoulder, as if ascertaining the lounge was empty, then leaned forward, slid both hands up Vincent’s neck, and pulled Vincent’s head down to plant a wet, tender kiss on his lips.
It’s a lie,
Vincent told himself, as his breath shortened and his body responded. Michelangelo was substantial, all muscle under the draped knits his wardrobe counterfeited. They both knew he controlled Vincent the instant Vincent let him close.

Just as Vincent knew Michelangelo’s apparent abandonment to the kiss was probably as counterfeit as his “hand-knitted” sweater.
It’s a lie
.
He took the therapy
. It didn’t help. His body believed; his intuition trusted; the partnership breathed into the kiss and breathed out again. Sparkles of sensation followed Michelangelo’s hands as they cupped Vincent’s skull and stroked his nape. He
knew
Michelangelo wanted him, as he had always known. As Michelangelo had always
permitted
him to know. He wondered what the ship’s Governors made of the kiss, whether they had been instructed to turn a blind eye on whatever illegalities proceeded between the diplomat and his attaché. Or if their interaction had been logged and would be reported to the appropriate agencies within the Colonial Coalition when
Kaiwo Maru
dispatched a packet bot.

The relationship between the Cabinet and the Governors was complex; the Cabinet did not carry out death sentences, and the Governors did not answer to the Cabinet. But after the Great Cull, they had begun performing some of their Assessments in accordance with planetary laws. There was détente; an alliance, of sorts, by which the Cabinet maintained control and the Governors, with their own inhuman logic and society, supported an administration that maintained ecological balance. Once, there had been many governments on Old Earth. Industrialized nation-states and alliances had used more than their share of resources and produced more than their share of waste. But Assessment had ended that, along with human life in the Northern Hemisphere. In the wake of an apocalypse, people often become reactionary, and the survivors of Assessment were disproportionately Muslim and Catholic. And in a society where being granted permission to reproduce was idealized—even fetishized—where every survivor meant that someone else had
not
lived…those who were different were not welcome.

Over a period of decades, in the face of necessity, resistance to the widespread use of reproductive technology and genetic surgery waned. The Governors did not care about the morality of the human-made laws they enforced. Or their irony either.

So, throughout Coalition space, that kiss was the overture to a capital case. But just this once, its illegality didn’t matter. That particular illegality was why they were here.

Michelangelo leaned back, but his breath stayed warm on Vincent’s cheek, and Vincent didn’t pull away.

“They’ll just separate us again when this is over.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We were useful to them once.”

“Politics were different then.”

“The politics are different now, too.”

Michelangelo disengaged, stepped back, and turned away. “Can’t honestly think we will be allowed within three systems of each other. After New Earth”—Michelangelo’s weight shifted, a guilty tell Vincent could have wasted half a day on if he’d been in the mood to try to figure out how much of what Michelangelo gave him was real—“we’re lucky the Cabinet thought us useful enough to keep alive.”

By Michelangelo’s standards, it was a speech. Vincent stood blinking for a moment, wondering what else had changed. And then he thought about therapy, and the chip concealed in—but isolated from—his wardrobe.
Don’t love you anymore.

That would make things easier, wouldn’t it?

“If we pull this off”—Vincent folded his hands behind his head—“The Cabinet won’t deny us much. We could retire on it. I could finally introduce you to my mother.”

A snort, but Michelangelo turned and leaned against the bubble, folding his arms. “If we don’t wind up Assessed.”

Vincent grinned, and Michelangelo grinned back reluctantly. The sour, sharp note in Michelangelo’s voice was a homecoming. “If we bring home
just
the technology we’re to negotiate for—”

“Assuming it is either portable or reproducible?”

“—we’re unlikely to find ourselves surplused. I know what a cheap, clean energy source will mean to the Captaincy on Ur. And to appeasing the Governors. What will it mean on Old Earth?”

Michelangelo had that expression, the knitted brow and set muscle in his jaw that meant he agreed with Vincent and wasn’t happy about it. He had to be thinking about Old Earth’s tightly managed population of fifty million, about biodiversity and environmental load and Assessment.
Culling
.

“On Earth?” Michelangelo would never call it
Old Earth,
unless speaking to someone who wouldn’t know what he meant otherwise. “Might mean no culls for fifty, a hundred years.”

“That would pay for a lot.” Michelangelo could do the math. Nonpolluting power meant that a larger population could be supported before triggering the Governors’ inexorable logic. The Governors did not argue. They simply followed the programs of the radical environmentalists who had unleashed them, and reduced the load.

Assessments were typically small now. Nothing like the near-extermination of the years surrounding Diaspora, because Old Earth’s population had remained relatively stable since nine and a half billion citizens had been reduced to organic compounds, their remains used to reclaim exhausted farmland, reinvigorate desertified grassland, enrich soil laid over the hulks of emptied cities—or simply sealed up in long-abandoned coal mines and oil wells.

Michelangelo’s nod was curt, and slow in coming. Vincent wondered if he’d been mistaken in pushing for it, but then Michelangelo made him a little present of the smile they both knew tangled Vincent’s breath around his heart. “And if we manage to overthrow their government, steal or destroy their tech, and get a picture of their prime minister in bed with a sheep in bondage gear?”

A heartbeat, but Vincent didn’t even try to keep the relief off his face. “They’ll probably give you another medal you’re not allowed to take home.”

Michelangelo’s laugh might have been mistaken for choking. He shook his head when he stopped, and waved a hand out the bubble at the light over the docking bay, on Boadicca Station’s side. “Light’s green. Let’s catch our bus.”

Pretoria household’s residence was already bannered and flowered and gilded to excess when Lesa arrived home, but that wasn’t limiting the ongoing application of gaud. The street-level entrance opened onto a wide veranda, and one of Pretoria household’s foremothers had wheedled House into growing a long, filigreed lattice from floor to roof around it. It was a pleasant, airy screen that normally created a sense of privacy without disrupting sight lines, but currently it was burdened with enough garland to drift scent for blocks, without considering the sticks of incense thrust in among the flowers. Those would be lit two evenings hence. In the meantime, misted water would keep the blooms fresh. Lesa climbed the steps along with the household male who’d accompanied her on her errand. Xavier carried a dozen bottles of wine in a divided wicker holder slung over his shoulder. He was a steady, careful sort; they didn’t clink.

Lesa herself had two bags—the pick of fresh fruit and vegetables from the morning’s markets—and two live chickens in a flat-bottomed sack, slumbering through their last hours in artificial darkness. It paid to get there early, especially near Carnival, and Elena wouldn’t trust the males or the servants with anything as important as buying for a holiday meal.

Besides, they were all busy decorating.

Katya, Lesa’s surviving daughter, supervised the activity on the veranda, her glossy black hair braided off her neck, unhatted in the sun. “Melanoma,” Lesa said, kissing her on the back of the head as she went by.

Katya was fifteen Amazonian years—twenty-odd, in standard conversion—and impatient with anything that smacked of responsible adulthood. And she wouldn’t wear her honor around the house; her hip was naked even of a holster. Of course, Lesa—both hands full of groceries, unable to reach her honor without dropping chickens or fruit—wasn’t much of an example, whatever her renown as a duelist twenty years and three children ago.

Katya blew her fringe out of her eyes. “Sunblock.” She rubbed Lesa’s cheek with a greasy finger. “Hats are too hot.”

“On the contrary,” Lesa said. “Hats are supposed to keep you cool.” But it was like arguing with a fexa; the girl just gave her an inscrutable look and went back to braiding a gardeneid garland, the sweet juice from the crushed stems slicking her fingers. “Want help?”

“Love it,” Katya said, “but Claude’s in there. The Coalition ship made orbit overnight. You’re on.”

“They got here for Carnival? Typical male timing.” Lesa stretched under her load.

“See you at dinner.” Katya ducked from under her lapful of flowers and turned so she could lean forward mockingly to kiss the ring her mother wore on the hand that was currently occupied by the sack of chickens.

Inside the door, Lesa passed the groceries to one of the household staff and sent her off with Xavier once he’d kicked his sandals at the catchall. Lesa balanced on each foot in turn and unzipped her boots before hanging them on the caddy. In Penthesilea’s equatorial heat, all sorts of unpleasant things grew in unaired shoes.

She dug her toes into the cool carpetplant with a sigh of relief and hung up her hat, grateful to House for taking the edge off the sun. Claude and Elena would be in the morning room at breakfast, which was still being served. Lesa’s stomach rumbled at the smell as she walked through seashell rooms and down an arched corridor, enjoying the aviform song House brought in from the jungle along with filtered light. Elena Pretoria was exactly where Lesa had imagined her, on the back veranda with her long hands spread on the arms of a rattan chair—real furniture, not provided by House—her silver-streaked hair stripped into a tail and her skin glowing dark gold against white lounging clothes. For all the air of comfort and grace she projected, however, Lesa noticed the white leather of her holster slung on her waist and buckled down to her thigh. Elena had a past as a duelist, too, and as a politician. And she wasn’t about to let Claude Singapore forget it, even if Claude’s position as prime minister was enough rank to let her enter another woman’s household without surrendering her honor.

Claude was tall and bony, a beautiful woman with blunt-cut hair that had been white as feathers since she was in her twenties, and some of the lightest eyes Lesa had ever seen—which perhaps explained the depth of the crow’s-feet decorating her face. They couldn’t all be from smiling, though Lesa wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Claude
not
smiling. She had an arsenal of smiles, including a melancholy one for funerals.

“Lesa,” Claude said, as Lesa greeted her mother with a little bow. “I’m here—”

“I heard. The grapevine’s a light-minute ahead.”

Claude stood up anyway, extending her hand. Lesa took it. Claude had a politician’s handshake, firm but gentle. “I don’t know why we even have media on this planet.”

“It gives us someone to blame for scandals,” Lesa answered, and Claude laughed even though it hadn’t been funny. “I’m ready. When will they make landfall?”

“Tomorrow. We’re shuttling them down. You’ll come by this evening for a briefing?”

“Of course,” Lesa said. “Dinnertime?”

“Good for me.”

Claude stepped away from her chair, and Elena took it as a cue to stand. “Leaving us already?”

“The Republic never sleeps. And I can hear Lesa’s stomach rumbling from here. I imagine she’d enjoy a quiet breakfast with her family before the madness begins.”

“Claude, I don’t mean to chase you out of your chair,” Lesa said, but Claude was turning to shake Elena’s hand.

“Nonsense.” Claude stepped back, and adjusted her holster. It was a Y-style, and they had a tendency to pinch when one stood. “I’ll see you tonight. I can show myself out—”

“Good-bye.” Lesa did walk a few steps toward the door with the guest, so as not to give offense. When Claude was safely gone, she tilted her head at Elena. “Why did she come herself?”