Carnival-SA (31 page)

“House,” he asked, “which way to the infirmary?”

The ripple of brightness was expected this time, a pattern of motion designed to catch a predator’s eye just the way light snagged on the V-shaped track of a big fish underwater. If he had to take a guess, he’d wager that was what Dragons ate. It made sense of the jaw full of slender, needle-sharp back-curved teeth, the sharply hooked talons. Following the light, he thought about that, distracted himself with images of arrowing, broad-winged green-and-blue beings hauling great silver fish squirming from the protected waters of the bay.

They were far superior images to the one that persisted when he did not force himself to think of something frivolous.

The rill led him through cool rooms and several corridors, his feet passing over carpetplant and what passed for tile the way the strand of light passed over moving images of jungle understory. He memorized this route, too. It was always good to know how to get out of whatever you were getting into. He smelled cut greenery, and then cooking, and finally the hospital reek of antiseptic, adhesive, and synthetic skin. The pale glow lingered around a closed iris. Vincent paused and rested his fingertips against the wall beside the door.

“House, open the door, please.”

It spiraled obediently wide. This was a public space, and there was no reason for House to forbid him entrance.

The murmur of voices washed out as he stepped inside. Or a voice, anyway. Katya bent over a flat-topped table covered with layers of folded cloth, one hand on the neck of the animal she whispered to and the other on his muzzle. It looked as if the bandages had been changed. Girl and khir were alone in the room. Katya glanced up, tensing, at the sound of the door. Walter might have lifted his head, but she stroked his neck and restrained him, and he relaxed under her hand. She also seemed to calm when she saw Vincent, but he knew it for a pretense. Her shoulders eased and her face smoothed, but no matter how softly she petted the khir’s feathers the lingering tension in her fingers propagated minute shivers across his skin.

Vincent cleared his throat. “Just how smart is a khir?”

She smiled. “Smart.”

“As smart as a human?”

“Well,” she said, stroking Walter’s feathers back along the bony ridge at the back of his skull, “not the same kind of smart. No. They don’t use tools or talk, but they understand fairly complicated instructions and they coordinate with humans and with their pack mates.”

“So they must communicate.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Pity he can’t talk,” Vincent said, sadly.

Katya colored, olive-tan skin pinking at the cheeks. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said, “I’m sorry about Miss Kusanagi-Jones. I want to offer my personal assurances that I and everyone in Pretoria house will do everything we can to find him and bring him home safe. Agnes is coordinating the search now, and I’ll relieve her in the morning.”

As if her words were permission, he stepped over the threshold and came fully into the room. The white tile floor was cool, even cold, shocking to feet that had already grown accustomed to carpetplant and the blood-warmth of House’s hallways. “I shall be praying for your mother,” he said, “and her safe and timely return.”

“Thank you,” she said after a hesitation, and licked her lips before she looked up again. “Do you pray often?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ur is a Christian colony.”

“Founded by Christians. Radicals, like New Amazonia.”

She kept her eyes on the khir, as if watching him breathe. He lay quietly, the nictitating membrane closed under outer lids at half-mast. She smoothed his feathers again. “We’re taught that Christians were among the worst oppressors of women. On Old Earth. That they held women responsible for all the sin and wickedness in the world.”

He chuckled. “Not my branch of the Church. We’re heretics.”

“Really?” She brightened as if it were a magic word. “Like Protestants?”

He shook his head and reached out slowly to lay his hand on Walter’s flank behind the bandages. The khir’s hide was soft and supple under scales like beads on an evening gown, pebbled against his fingertips. The khir sighed as another breath of tension left his muscles. Vincent’s own heart slowed, the ache across his shoulders easing in response.

“Descended, philosophically speaking, from the very first heresy of all. One that was eradicated by the Paulines about two and a half thousand years ago, for being prone to sentiments that were thought to undermine the authority of the Church.”

He had her interest. She brushed the back of his hand and he could feel her trembling, though she restrained the appearance of it well. “But was it really a…church yet?”

“There was a bishop.” She laughed, so he continued. “Who didn’t approve of their ideas, such as that the Christ might speak to anyone and not solely through the Apostles, and that God was both masculine and feminine and thus women might serve equally as well as men, and that the passion of the Christ was a physical ordeal only, and did not affect his divine essence, and so martyrdom was kind of silly. You know, the usual heresies.”

“And you believe all that?”

He smiled and turned his hand over, pressing it to hers palm to palm. “I was raised to. My mother’s philosophy is a utilitarian one. She believes the purpose of religion, or government, is to maintain the maximum number of people in the maximum possible comfort. And so it suits her to believe that what the serpent offered Eve in the garden wasn’t sin, but self-knowledge. Enlightenment.
Gnosis
.”

Katya shook her head. “That’s supposed to be the story that was used to justify oppressing women.”

“But what if the snake did her a favor?”

“Then Eve’s not the villain. Your mother’s supposed to be some kind of a prophet, isn’t she? On your home world?”

“Gnostics believe that anyone can prophesy, if the spirit moves them. She is”—he shrugged—“very good at getting people to listen to her. On Ur, and elsewhere. Enough so that even Earth has to deal with her.”

She squeezed lightly before she pulled her hand away. “Okay, you said you were raised to believe that. But you didn’t answer my question.”

He grinned and let her let go. “Do you believe everything you’re taught, Miss Pretoria?”

When she paused and swallowed, it was all there in her expression, for far longer and much more plainly than she would have liked. How Lesa had missed it, Vincent couldn’t imagine. Of course, he’d missed Michelangelo’s duplicity. And even for a Liar, that was an impressive trick. The hardest people to read were the ones one was most emotionally attached to, because one’s own projections and desires would interfere with the analysis. One would see what one wanted to see. There was no surprise in not noticing the knife in Brutus’s hand.

Katya Pretoria stepped back, shaking filthy locks of hair out of her eyes. Flecks of blood stuck the strands together. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “Now, if you will excuse me, Miss Katherinessen, I’m going to get Walter upstairs and try for some sleep myself. I have to relieve Agnes in the morning.”

Kii watches the rust-colored biped climb. Its heartbeat is fast, blood pressure elevated, serotonin
levels depleted, blood sugar dropping, lactic acid levels high, breathing shallow. It is, in short,
exhausted, hungry, and dangerously emotional.

Kii waits until it regains its temporary refuge and is alone, in what the bipeds call privacy. Then
he clears the wall and appears. “Greetings, Vincent Katherinessen.”

“Kii,” it says. “I was just about to call you. I know the Consent is that you will not assist me—”

“You wish to know if Kii can locate Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones.”

“I wish it, yes.” The biped pauses its speech, but not its motion. If anything, the short quick steps
appear to Kii
like a futile struggle against the inevitable edict. “And Lesa. Katya Pretoria knows
what happened.”

“It shoots Kusanagi-Jones in the back,” Kii says.

The russet biped rounds on Kii’s projected image, manipulators clenching. “What?”

“Your mate is unharmed,” Kii adds speedily. “It is struck by a sedative capsule. No permanent
damage inflicted. Lesa Pretoria is also uninjured, and is restrained in a tangler.”

This linear, discursive mode of communication is vastly limited and inefficient, prone to
misparsing. It requires finesse to communicate accurately in this fashion. How much more elegant
to present information in poem matrices, with observed, stipulated, speculated, and potential
elements clearly identified and quantified by the grammar of the construct.
The Katherinessen biped sinks on the edge of the bed, elbows on its legs, manipulators that seem
powerful for its size dangling between its knees, knuckles facing. “Where are they?”

Kii accesses records, flicks through House’s files. At last, reluctantly, Kii says, “They are not in
range of House’s nodes.”

“They’re out of the city. In the jungle?”

“That follows as a strong potential.”

“Hell,” the biped says. “Now I have to tell Elena that her granddaughter is a traitor. I do not get
paid enough for this.”

19

LESA WOKE COLD, A NOVEL EXPERIENCE IN PENTHESILEA in summer. Her hands in particular were numb (the left one beyond pins-and-needles and into deadness), her ankles sore, her neck cramped from lying slumped on her side. The hair that dragged through her mouth was foul with blood and dirt and the acrid bitterness of tangler solvent, and she spat and spat trying to clear it away. She lay on an earthen floor, and she could smell the jungle. Smell it—and hear it. Night sounds, which explained why her eyes strained at darkness. The canopy filtered daylight, but blocked the Gorgon’s light almost entirely. She heard birds and insects—and a fexa’s warble, closer than she liked, even if she was lucky and there was a stout stockade between them.

She flexed and kicked but didn’t learn anything that surprised her. Her wrists were bound at the small of her back and her ankles strapped. When she lifted her head, her neck amended its status from painful to excruciating, and she fell back, trying to ease the spasm, crying between her teeth. Incapacitating pain was the first priority. That, and getting her weight off her left arm. A wriggle of her hips flopped her onto her back, yanking her wrists against the cords. This position was no kinder to her hands, but she bore the pressure and the cutting tautness for the sheer, blessed relief of letting the earth support the weight of her head.

Something feather-quick and many-legged scurried across her ankle, but she managed not to react. Pointless caution. She’d made enough noise already that one little thrash and scream would cause no harm. But most New Amazonian “insects” were completely disinterested in any Old Earth fauna that wasn’t actively forcing them to defend themselves. Lesa guessed that when it came down to it, human type people just smelled wrong.

Something stretched on her left side, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from it and hear the slow hiss of breathing, in and out. Now that Lesa could concentrate on something other than the pain in her neck, she smelled unwashed male over her own sweat and tangler solvent. The solvent explained why she was cold. The stuff was something like 95 percent isopropyl alcohol.
Michelangelo
. She got her knees drawn up, straps cutting the tendons of her ankles, and with one hard shove flopped onto her right side. Pain seared up her neck and her left arm sizzled violently to life. She had preferred it, she decided, when it was flopping from her shoulder like the corpse of a dead animal. Kusanagi-Jones wasn’t cold. She pressed against his back, but he breathed regularly, his body swaying in response to her nudges with the fluidity of deep unconsciousness. Her right shoulder and upper arm scraped earth painfully as she squirmed closer, writhing over broad shoulders to press her face against the close-clipped base of his skull. As she cuddled up, she realized she heard two sets of snores—Kusanagi-Jones’s, faintly, and muffled as if through walls, a louder rasp.
I hope Vincent’s not the jealous type.
Gallows humor. The pain of one bitten-off chuckle brought tears to her eyes.

“Miss Kusanagi-Jones.” She heaved herself against him. Every movement jostling her neck felt as if somebody had run electrified wires under her skin. “Miss Kusanagi-Jones!”

His breath caught and a light moan fluttered at the back of his throat, but he didn’t wake. She lowered her head and shoved, smacking her head into his neck. “Dammit, Michelangelo.”

He vanished.

A second later, air cooling against her chest, she realized she
had
felt him move. One moment, Kusanagi-Jones was a yielding obstacle rocking in time to her efforts. The next, she was alone in the dark, and something thumped—a meat-on-bare-earth sound—followed by silence. And then a voice, barely a breath. “Miss Pretoria?”

She sighed, trying not to dwell on the strength it would have taken to flip himself to his feet while bound wrist and ankle. “Very impressive. So how are you at square knots?”

Michelangelo’s wardrobe wasn’t functioning, information delivered quite unceremoniously by the weight of imitation cloth on his shoulders. He couldn’t tell if it had failed due to power drain or because of exposure to an electromagnetic pulse weapon of some sort.

The wardrobe was shielded, but shielded was not
invulnerable
. His low-light add-ons, his watch, and his other sense enhancements weren’t functioning either, which told him it was a power problem and not just the wardrobe. But in the case of failure, the fog assumed a default configuration. In Kusanagi-Jones’s case, his gi—and that was what hung around him now with a strangely
material
weight. A quick triage would not rank a malfunctioning wardrobe as the greatest of his problems. The foglets would have made short work of his restraints, but he was trained to operate without them. No, the immediate problem was one of where he was being held, and how to get out of there.