Carnival-SA (28 page)

Kii, filling an apparent silence, said, “Your genotype proves resistant, Vincent Katherinessen.”

“Don’t
know,
” Kusanagi-Jones said, over Kii. “If there is, it’s hiding in plain sight—You trust him.”

“It’s not human body language.”

“You trust him anyway.”

Slowly, Vincent nodded. He reached out gently and took Kusanagi-Jones’s arm again, folding his fingers around the biceps and holding on like a child clinging to an adult’s finger.

“Bugger it,” Kusanagi-Jones said out loud. “So do I.” He waved at Kii. “Do we know it’s fatal?”

“Kii estimates a 93 percent mortality rate.”

“Cure him,” Vincent said.

And again, Kusanagi-Jones stepped away from his partner and said, “Wait.”

17

LESA DID NOT WANT TO TALK TO HER MOTHER. SHE MOST particularly had no desire at all to tell Elena the truth about Robert, and she was still working out her spin when the door to her office irised open again, admitting Katya. Her hair was bound back in a smooth, straight tail, and—an out-of-character note—her honor was strapped over garish festival trousers.

“I’m going out,” Katya announced, a conclusion Lesa had already drawn. “Do you want anything?”

“No. Thank you. Home for supper or out all night?”

Katya looked down. “It depends if I find a good party.”

The relationship between Lesa and her middle child had always resembled an arms race. Katya had been determined to become unreadable since she was a small child and she was often successful. But Lesa could almost always tell when she was hiding something, if not what she was hiding. Lesa laid her stylus across the finished response to Claude she had been staring at, and folded her hands over it.
Please let it be something innocent
. A secret lover, a questionable hobby. Anything Katya thought Lesa should disapprove of.

Anything, but knowing where Robert was and concealing it from the rest of the household.

“All right,” Lesa said. “Try to stay out of fights.”

“Mom.”
Katya paused before making good her escape. “Oh, and Grandma wants to see you. She’s up in the solar.”

“Wonderful.” Lesa levered herself from her chair, leaving the stylus laid across the desk but slipping the card into an envelope. “That’s what I was waiting for. Thank you, Katya.”

“No problem.” Katya grinned before slipping out the door.

Lesa followed, but turned right instead of left. She worried at her thumbnail with her teeth as she strode down the short, fluted corridor and climbed the stairwell past the second floor, where Vincent and Michelangelo were temporarily housed. Sweat trickled down her neck by the time she reached the third story and stopped in her own room.

It was full of evening light. Walter dozed in his basket, warmed by a filtered ray of sun, and for three or four ticks she contemplated activating the beacon in his collar and sending him after Katya. But that would hardly be subtle; it wasn’t as if he could be told to
hide
from her. Lesa would have to track Katya herself, after she spoke to Elena. That would give Katya enough of a head start. In the meantime, Lesa combed her hair, changed her shirt, and went to talk to her mother. Elena’s solar was at the top of Pretoria house, and Lesa took the lift. That climb was above and beyond the call of casual exercise in the service of keeping fit.

The room was pleasantly open, airy and fresh, with the windows on the sunset side dimmed by shades currently and the other directions presenting views of the city, sea, and jungle. Elena stood at the easternmost side, staring over the bay and its scatter of pleasure craft and one or two shipping vessels cutting white lines across glass blue.

“How much trouble are we in?” Elena asked before Lesa could announce her presence. Lesa crossed the threshold, stepping from the smooth warmth of House’s imitation of terra-cotta tile to cool, resilient carpetplant. “It’s less bad than it could be. Antonia Kyoto has injected herself into the situation.”

“What?” Elena’s voice shivered; through the careful modulation, Lesa read the blackness of her mood.

“She’s Parity. Robert was doubling for her.”

Elena laid her hands on the window ledge and tightened her fingers until the tendons on her wrists stood out. “Of course he was. I’ll have him flogged for that.”

“It gets worse.”

Elena turned away from the window. “By all means, draw out the suspense.”

“He didn’t run away to Antonia.”

“Then where, pray tell?”

Lesa held her hands up, open and empty.

She heard Elena take two slow breaths before she spoke again. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

“There’s good news,” Lesa added hastily. “I’ve talked with Katherinessen, and it seems I was wrong about Kusanagi-Jones. He’s sympathetic, and brings Free Earth assets to the table.”

The latest indrawn breath hissed out again in a sigh. Elena closed her eyes briefly and nodded. “That is good news. And the deal with Katherine Lexasdaughter?”

“Proceeds. She stands ready to present a united front with us. Vincent—Miss Katherinessen—came very well prepared. Kusanagi-Jones less so, in that he’ll have to carry word of our plans to his contacts on Old Earth personally.”

“Of course, out of twenty named worlds, the defiance of three won’t make much difference in terms of military might.”

“No,” Lesa said. “But House will protect us. And it will mean something in terms of leadership. We just need to show that the Coalition
can
be opposed. I’ve provided a full report on the Coalition agents, anyway.” She stretched her back until it cracked, and pitched her voice higher. “House, would you send the report to Elena’s desk, please?”

The walls dimmed slightly in answer, and Elena nodded thanks. “There’s something else.”

“News travels fast.”

Elena’s smile only touched one corner of her mouth. “Agnes said Kusanagi-Jones received a challenge card.”

“From Claude, yes.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

It was Lesa’s turn for a collected smile. “I’m going to fight for him.”

“Wait?”
Vincent snapped, but Angelo met his gaze with that infuriating impassive frown. Vincent’s fingers tightened against his palm, as if there were any way in the world he could make Angelo do anything he hadn’t already meant to do.

“Can you think of a better plan?” And oh, his voice was so damned reasonable when he said it.

“Cheaper than a war.”

“It’s not what I would call ethical,” Vincent said. He glanced up at Kii for support, but the Dragon only watched them, feathered brows beetled over incurious eyes. “You’ve no way to control it, and it will cost a lot of innocent lives.”

“It will,” Michelangelo said, folding his arms, his face relaxing into furrows of worry and grief. “And at least one not so innocent one.”

He meant himself. And he was letting Vincent
see
him, the whole story, nothing concealed. The intimacy rocked Vincent in sympathetic waves of Michelangelo’s fear and desperation. He was scared sick. It was in the creases beside his eyes, the crossed arms, the slight lean back on his heels. Scared, and he thought it was worth doing anyway.

Killing off nearly half the population of Old Earth would sure as hell limit the threat of the OECC as a conquering power, Vincent would give Michelangelo that. He still didn’t think it was the world’s greatest solution to the problem.

“You’re not doing this,” Vincent said. “That’s an order.”

“The alternative is letting Old Earth drag the Coalition worlds into a fight that Kii and the Consent would end when it got to New Amazonia. Probably get twice as many killed on both sides. Nuclear option, Vincent. It will save lives.”

Kii’s feathered tufts ruffled and smoothed. “We would not be pleased to do so.”

“No,” Vincent said. “I don’t imagine you would. Kii, I have another option. Would the Consent, uh, consent to teach my people to create Transcendent matrices such as yours?”

“Your species may not be suited.”

“What do you mean?”

“My species chooses to copy our psyches into an information state, and to permit our physical selves to grow old and fail.”

“Of course,” Vincent said. It wasn’t as if one could actually
upload
one’s personality, stripping the man out of the brain and loading it into a computer like a Raptured soul ascending bodily to heaven. One made a copy. And that left the problem of what to do with the originals.

“We accepted that to do so, our physicalities must die without progeny. The Consent was given, and so it was…wrought. No, so it abided.” Kii angled its nose down at them. “Kii thinks biped psychology is unamenable to such constraints.”

“Bugger,” Angelo said into the silence. “Shove it down their throats if we have to—”

“No,” Vincent said, rubbing his hands through his braids so the nap of his hair scratched his palms.

“We’d have to sterilize the lot. An entire planetary population for whom procreation is the most cherished ideal? It wouldn’t change anything, except we’d have Transcendent copies of them in a quantum computer leading productive virtual lives. The plague’s a better idea. Which is not to say it’s not a lousy idea.”

He glared at Michelangelo, and Michelangelo unfolded his arms, a gesture of acceptance but not surrender. “We’ll wait,” he said. “For now. Try to come up with something better.”

“You’re content to walk around breeding retrovirus for the next two weeks?”

Angelo echoed Vincent’s gesture, palms across his scalp, but his version added a yawn. “Sounds a regular vacation, doesn’t it?”

On the way out, Lesa stopped in her room, discovered that Walter had apparently gone to the courtyard to stretch his legs, and got a leash before heading down to collect him. Far from gamboling with the children, the khir was sprawled in a sunbeam, sides rising and falling with steady regularity. Awakened from his nap, he stretched lazily front and back and trotted around her twice on her way to the door, as if to prove that lesser khir might need to be leashed, but he certainly didn’t. All his blandishments were in vain. She clicked the leash to his collar as they stepped out the front door, and then crouched to tap the veranda with her forefinger and say, “Find Katya.”

Walter whisked his muzzle across the deck and picked his way down the stairs, pausing at the bottom to sniff again before angling left, toward the bigger thoroughfare, threading between merrymakers at a rate that had Lesa hustling to keep up. She trotted, too, keeping the leash slack, though Walter occasionally turned to glare. “I’m running as fast as I can!”

He didn’t seem to believe her, but he was too well trained to lunge at the lead, even when irritated by streets clotted by buskers and food vendors. It had been Lesa’s idea to train the household khir as messengers, when she was Katya’s age, an idea that had turned out well. So well that other households had copied the trick once they found out how adept the khir were at memorizing routes. The pace he set was better than a jog. Her honor jarred on her thigh with every footstep; her hair disarrayed and stuck to her forehead with sweat. She clucked to Walter, slowing him as they threaded between people so they wouldn’t accidentally trample other pedestrians and spark a duel, or overrun Katya and have rather a lot of explaining to do.

That Katya had gone on foot heightened Lesa’s suspicions. If she’d called a car—either public transport or Pretoria house’s communal one—her destination would have become a matter of record. Walking for exercise was one thing, but it was early for parties, even in Carnival, and if Katya
were
going to parties, she wouldn’t want to arrive sweat-saturated and stinking.

Lesa had always encouraged Robert to know her children, to develop relationships with them, far beyond the customary. He had, and both Robert and the children had seemed to enjoy it. And now Katya was making Lesa pay for it.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

After their dead-end conversation with Kii, Vincent had happened to be watching when Lesa appeared in the courtyard, whistled for her pet, and snapped a leash onto his collar. “Angelo,” he’d said, without turning, “follow her.”

Which was how Kusanagi-Jones came to be slipping through the steadily increasing press of cheering, staggering, singing men and women behind Lesa and her animal like the sting on an adder’s tail, following the rest of what he took to be a long and somewhat complicated snake. Vincent remained at Pretoria house, nursing his sunburn and wrenched knee and covering Kusanagi-Jones’s tracks, but the drop from their balcony was only four meters and Kusanagi-Jones could have done it without tools, stark naked and on a sprained ankle.

Fully equipped, he could almost take it as an insult how easy escape had been. Robert’s decampment was more interesting, and Kusanagi-Jones was still trying to comprehend it. Based on his imperfect understanding of the layout of Pretoria house, the men’s quarters were isolated well up the tower and guarded. It was a descent that could not be made inobviously on ropes, especially in the middle of a festival, and if the guard had not been overpowered, the obvious solution was that somebody inside the house had assisted Robert in getting out.

Kusanagi-Jones wasn’t surprised to discover that Vincent wasn’t sanguine as to Lesa’s involvement. Robert certainly wasn’t the only double in Pretoria house, and neither Vincent nor Kusanagi-Jones wanted to trust Lesa more than necessary.

Which was somewhat ridiculous, given how much Kusanagi-Jones was trusting Vincent. But at this point, if he wasn’t going to choose to trust Vincent he might as well go home, hand in his commission, and wait to be surplused. For the first time in his life, political and personal ideals were aligning, and if that wasn’t worth dying for, he was in the wrong line of work.

And so as they left the side street graced by Pretoria house, he dropped the camouflage function on his wardrobe as he stepped into a shadow, and stepped out again dressed to blend with the Carnival crowd. His wardrobe had no license of a mask, but it could provide something that would pass for a street license, barring inspection—and, it being Carnival, there were a lot of men on the thoroughfares. Though Kusanagi-Jones didn’t think he’d have cared to try it any other time of year. The moderately illegal modifications to the cosmetics subroutine he carried—under Cabinet seal, as patching a wardrobe was beyond even Vincent’s skills—made it easy to change his skin tone and alter his facial features. Programs for haircut, color, style, length, and texture came standard. He couldn’t do much about his height—beyond heeled shoes—or his build, and those were distinctive enough to cause him worry. Fortunately, Lesa Pretoria was either stringing along any potential tail, or she just wasn’t very good at spotting one. She knew what she was supposed to do—the techniques were there—but the application was crude. And even had she been more accomplished, she was hampered by the animal that accompanied her. An animal that was going somewhere.