Carnival-SA (33 page)

Now all he had to do was wrap up two kidnappings, a sabotage operation, a first-contact situation, a duel to the death, convince Michelangelo he didn’t want to play kamikaze, and figure out exactly how he was going to get rid of the Governors
and
protect Ur and New Amazonia from the imperial ambitions of the Coalition. Oh, yes, and at least give his ostensible task—that of reaching some sort of détente with whoever was in charge of the New Amazonian government by the end of the week—enough of a lick and a promise that he could justify declaring the mission accomplished and heading home. Or, potentially, blow it so badly that he and Angelo were both discharged in disgrace, which would save him the additional delicate operation of prying Michelangelo loose from the OECC. Because Michelangelo
was
coming home with him.

Just as soon as Vincent reclaimed him.

Piece of cake.

He closed the documents and stood in the darkness, running fingertips along the slick leaves and soft petals garlanding the lattice. A flicker of movement in his fisheye alerted him to company, and he turned his head, but it wasn’t Elena or any of her servants. Instead, a child stood framed in the doorway, pressed close to one of the posts as if he thought he could meld into them. A boy child, nine or ten Old Earth years, six or seven New Amazonian.

Lesa’s son, the one she so desperately wanted to be gentle.

“Hello,” Vincent said.

“Hello,” the boy answered. He came forward a few more steps, from the lighted hallway to the darkness of the porch. “Are you really a diplomat?”

Vincent smiled. The boy—Julian—was hesitant and calm, but the lilt in his voice said he was curious. And Lesa thought he was a genius, and wasted on New Amazonia.

She might even be right.

In any case, if Vincent was likely to wind up smuggling the kid home in his suitcase, he might as well get to know him. “I am, among other things. Your mother’s very proud of you.”

The child sidled along the wall sideways, back to the house but meeting Vincent’s eyes defiantly. “She says if I want to be a mathematician I have to be like you.”

“Like me?”

Julian nodded, his hands linking behind him, shoulders squeezing back as he crowded against the wall.

“Gentle. Otherwise I’ll be sent to foster and train soon, and then I’ll go to the Trials and be chosen by another house.”

“And you won’t have time for mathematics then?” As Vincent understood it, not everybody was as…permissive…with their stud males as Pretoria house. His heart skipped painfully while he waited for the answer.
Poor kid
.

“Mother says,” Julian said, tilting his head back as he recalled her words, “that women don’t like males who seem too smart. They find them threatening.”

What an elegant little parrot she’s created,
Vincent thought, and wanted to bury his face in his hands.

“So she says I can only play with computers and numbers when I grow up if I’m gentle,” Julian continued, still childlike enough to take his silence for rapt attention. “Like you. So I must be gentle…”

“Because you love numbers so much.”

Julian nodded. “But it’s not bad, being like you, right?”

Vincent found the edge of Elena’s wicker chair, sat down on it, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. The cosmic irony of the moment didn’t elude him. This child was no more a budding homosexual than Michelangelo was thick-headed, and Vincent had to fold his hands together to keep them from shaking as he thought about Julian embarking on a life of sexual deception so he’d have an option of careers. “No,” he said. “People can be cruel. But being like me isn’t bad. I had to lie about it for a very long time, though, and pretend to be something I wasn’t to keep my job.”

The boy’s eyes were wide. “I thought you were a diplomat because you’re, you know, because you don’t fight.”

It cost Vincent a painful effort to keep the smile off his face. The last thing this fumbling child needed was to think somebody he was looking to as a role model found him amusing. “Things are different on Old Earth,” he said. “Gentle males are…stigmatized. Do you know that word?”

“The stud males run everything and don’t like gentle ones.”

“Yes.”

“Like the other boys make fun of me for playing with numbers.”

“Yes.”

“How come?” An earnest question, not plaintive, as Julian’s hands fell to his sides as he forgot himself enough to step away from the wall.

It deserved an honest answer. “I don’t know.” Which was as honest as he could be. “Your mother says you’re very talented.”

The boy’s skin was dark, darker than Lesa’s if not as dark as Robert’s. In a better light, Vincent wouldn’t have been able to see him blush. “She said that?”

“She did. She asked me if I would sort of be a mentor for you.” Not too much of a stretch, and Vincent didn’t feel bad about it. The child’s mother and father were missing, his sister was under arrest, and if he felt alone and frightened, he didn’t have to feel
that
alone and frightened. Julian glanced over his shoulder toward the door, the sidelong look of somebody operating under a guilty conscience. “Do you know anything about programming quantum arrays?”

“Not a thing,” Vincent admitted. “But I listen well. You can teach me.”

He set his watch to record, and let the boy chatter on about transforms and quantifiable logic and fractal decision trees and a few thousand other things that might as well have been Swahili. No, not even.
Urdu,
because thanks to Michelangelo’s remarkable—and habitually concealed—gift for languages, Vincent actually spoke a fair amount of Swahili.

In any case, Julian talked, and Vincent made encouraging noises. And before too long, he started to wonder exactly what Julian was doing wandering around the house alone in the middle of the night, when from what Vincent had seen even young males didn’t go about unescorted. Except, of course, during Carnival.

The boy had to pause for breath eventually. “Julian,” Vincent said, “how did you get out of the Blue Rooms to come talk to me? Did somebody give you a pass?”

Julian’s mobile mouth thinned and he shook his head jerkily. “No pass.”

“So how?”

Because as far as Vincent knew there was supposed to be only one route out of the harem, and it was supposed to be guarded. By Agnes, usually, who had been out of the house trying to locate any trace of Lesa and Michelangelo, and whom Elena had just summoned home to help deal with Katya.

“Did you just walk out?”

“My sire showed me,” Julian said, quietly. “There’s a secret stair. I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”

Which explained how Robert had escaped. “Julian,” Vincent said, “I think you’d better go back before your grandmother catches you out of bed.”

“But—”

“It’s okay. I promise we’ll talk some more tomorrow.” He stood up, slouching enough to minimize his height advantage on a kid who hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, and came over to Julian, hunkering down a little to speak to him eye to eye. He put his hand on Julian’s shoulder and felt the boy shudder, as if the companionable contact was a threat.

In his society, a sane reaction. “It’s okay,” Vincent said again. “I’ll help. Right now, we have to get your mom back, and my partner. After that—”

Julian nodded jerkily and stepped back into the doorway. They stared at one another for a moment, and then a moment later Julian sidestepped and was gone.

Kii is restless.

This is not a sensation Kii is any longer accustomed to, and Kii is some time in identifying it.
Restlessness is not one of the emotional routines that Kii finds useful in Kii’s work.
Kii is somewhat disconcerted at first. Inspection, however, reveals the source of the emotion; it is
an outflow of the Consent. The Consent wishes more information regarding
Kaiwo Maru
and
regarding the life forms that inhabit her.

They are made things, like the khir, and like the khir,
they are guardians. They are intelligent, and
they are designed, but they are not people.

There are differences. The khir serve. They guard the Consent’s endless dreamings, but these
Governors, while designed to serve a purpose, serve it by ruling over the
esthelich
creatures who
created them.

It is an inversion.

Perhaps the bipeds are truly alien enough to place their destiny in the hands of monsters. Or
perhaps there is a miscalculation, and this is the result. Kii cannot yet be sure, and the Consent is
chary of deciding on so thin a pattern.

Kii continues to research. The Governors are an advantage to Kii’s bipeds—the local colony, that
is. The bipeds Kii identifies as Kii’s pets, and which the Consent is to abet.
The Governors advantage Kii’s bipeds because they severely curtail the growth of the nonlocal
population.

But they are a disadvantage as well. They create a population that is extremely creative and
active, without the drain of substandard individuals. In other words, by ensuring that only
extraordinary and accomplished individuals survive, and by skewing that population toward those
most practically creative, the Governors nourish innovation. They force the Coalition outward,
groping, grasping, subsuming other colony worlds.

They are the engine that drives the expansion that Kii has informed Michelangelo Osiris Leary
Kusanagi-Jones that Kii will not permit in local space-time.

The Consent is temporary. The potentialities are complex, the patterns not yet emergent. The
current solution is to prepare for three eventualities deemed likely. The first requires no action, as
there are possibilities in motion that carry the Coalition away from local space-time for the
foreseeable potentialities. The second is the
need to eradicate the Governors as a species, which
will alleviate immediate population pressure on the Coalition worlds and thus the immediate
threat to the local colony. This solution carries an attendant ecological cost and an eventual
pattern that may mean dealing with stronger and larger Coalition feelers. The third is to prepare
to exterminate as much of the nonlocal population of bipeds as is deemed necessary to prevent
their encroachment, if the emerging pattern proves them belligerent.
When the waves collapse, Kii will be glad to no longer worry. But they are not yet resolved, and so
Kii
is
worried, and the Consent is not open to Kii’s advice.
Kii believes that a preemptive strike would be more effective.
Kaiwo Maru
is the nexus of
probabilities, the center of the indeterminacies. If
Kaiwo Maru
is destroyed, so many waves
collapse—

Kii is overruled. The Consent is that there are too many
esthelich
intelligences aboard
Kaiwo Maru
in addition to the Governors, and the
esthelich
do not act yet in belligerence. The Consent is
to observe and prepare.

The Consent takes hold, and Kii ceases to recall why Kii, in an alternately collapsed wave, would
have felt differently.

When Elena returned in the growing light of morning, Vincent’s fisheye showed that she’d been crying. He hadn’t resumed her chair after Julian left, and instead stood in the shadows near the lattice, watching things like moths and probably named for them come and go among the dead, plucked flowers, ignoring what threads of music and laughter drifted in from the streets. They were jangling, frantic sounds.
Have
fun quick, before someone comes and stops you
.

“You don’t like the garland,” Elena said, when he realized she was waiting for him to notice her, and turned. Her voice rasped. She coughed and rubbed her mouth with her hand.

“They’re dead. It strikes me as macabre to hang murdered plants all over your buildings. How much longer is Carnival?”

“Seven days,” she said. “Ten all together. And the flowers are dead because nothing grows in a Dragon city. Except carpetplant. They do their own weeding.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“That’s how the cities survived intact.” She came closer and joined him at the lattice, peering through the blooms to the empty courtyard. “Katya’s not talking,” she said. “We’re going to have to go to Claude.”

“Not an option,” he said, and bit his lip. “I didn’t mean to say that. Some sneaky, underhanded diplomat I am.”

She didn’t step closer, but he felt her warmth against his arm. It reminded him that his shoulders itched, and he tightened his fingers on the ledge of the porch railing.

“You’re more worried about him than you pretend.”

He looked at her standing there, open-eyed, empty-palmed, and for a moment almost managed to think of her as human.

“We need to involve security and the militia,” she continued when it became apparent he had nothing to say. “I can’t do that without Claude.”

“Elder Kyoto is on our side.”

“Elder Kyoto wouldn’t keep her job long enough to be of any use to us if she tried to sneak this past the administration. Why are you so opposed to involving them?”

“Other than her challenging Angelo to a duel?”

“Political maneuvering,” Elena said with a wave of her hand. “There’s more.”

“All right,” Vincent said, and let his hands fall open, too. “I believe she and Saide Austin are aware of—no, in collusion with—the operators of an illegal genetics lab somewhere on New Amazonia. And that they used that lab to create a retrovirus with which they then infected my partner, with the intent of spreading a deadly epidemic across Old Earth.”

“You have proof?” Elena asked, as of course she would.

“It’s in Angelo’s bloodstream,” Vincent answered. “We hadn’t had time to get it taken care of yet.”

“Oh.” She took a half-step forward, belly against the railing, her hands curled hard on the edge.

“Yeah,” Vincent said. “I’m not sure talking to Claude is the best possible solution.”