Carnival-SA (43 page)

And then Vincent, eventually, would be dead as well, and there would be nothing left of Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones, except a string of dead men’s names.

And Kii. Kii would remember him. And Kii, or some propagation of Kii, might someday make its way home to New Amazonia, and the Consent would reclaim its prodigal.

They might not change. They might never accept change. It was not in the ethos of the Dragons, other than the explorer-caste, essential and ignored.

But they could appreciate poetry. And the story would have an ending, after all.

Epilogue

IT CAME, UNBELIEVABLY, ON THERMOPAPER. A DNA-CODED diplomatic packet, read-to-destroy, for Vincent Katherinessen, Old Earth Colonial Coalition Diplomatic Corps, Lt. Col., Ret.

Hard copy.

He’d never held one before.

He licked his thumb and pressed it against the catch.

The message within was brief:

With one thing and another, Rome fell before they decided to waste the bullet. Coming the

long way round, but I’m coming. Hope you weren’t kidding about introducing me to your

mom.

Would you believe it?

All those years, all those worlds, and we were wrong.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She currently lives in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas, Nevada, but she’s trying to escape. Her recent and forthcoming appearances include:
SCIFICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, On Spec, H.P. Lovecraft’s
Magazine of Horror, Chiaroscuro, Ideomancer, The Fortean Bureau,
Polish fantasy magazine
Nowa
Fantastyka
, and the anthologies
Shadows Over Baker Street
(Del Rey, 2003) and
All-Star Zeppelin
Adventure Stories
(Wheatland Press, 2004). She’s a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Hutzul, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it. Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.

Also by Elizabeth Bear

SCARDOWN

Be sure not to miss

UNDERTOW

The next exciting novel from

Elizabeth Bear

André Deschênes is a killer, but he wants to be more. If he can find a teacher who will forgive
his past, he can learn to manipulate the odds, control probability, become a conjure man. But
the world he lives on is run by the ruthless Charter Trade company, and the floating city called
Novo Haven is little more than a company town, where humans and aliens alike either work for
the Greene family or are destroyed by it. In the bayous and back alleys, revolution is stirring.
And one more death may be all it takes to shift the balance…

Here’s a special preview:

UNDERTOW

Elizabeth Bear

Coming Soon!

Over the years, André had come to accept that his luck was often ridiculous, but he hadn’t expected a shot at filling the contract his first night out. He folded his forearms over the handlebars of his wetdry scoot and let it bob, lights dark, on the moonlit water of the bay. The floor pushed at his feet as it yawed; he ducked behind the faring so his head wouldn’t silhouette on the horizon. The craft was low-profile; without the brightness of the sky or of Novo Haven’s lights behind him, André was nothing more than a blacker patch on the water.

About that luck, he thought, watching Lucienne Spivak and her guest come chattering down the floating dock. Ridiculous wasn’t the half of it. Epic, maybe. Operatic.
Farcical
. Because even by moonlight, with his lowlight adapt kicked up, he recognized the woman walking alongside Spivak, leaning into her so that their shoulders brushed, ducking down as they shook their heads over some joke funny enough that André could hear their laughter across the water.

“You know,” he murmured under his breath, “you couldn’t make this shit up.”

He wasn’t going to kill anybody in front of his girlfriend. Some things were beyond the call of duty, and it would be difficult to make it look like an accident if Spivak suddenly went down, clutching her throat.
And
he wasn’t in a hurry. Impatient men often didn’t do well in André’s line of work.
Luck will only get
you so far.
Even ridiculous luck—

With his lowlight, he could make out the hunched shape of a minifab at the top of the dock, a white shell path leading up to it. The residence itself was in a sheltered inlet, not quite up the bayou—as Nouel had suggested—but on a channel and away from the open bay. A paramangrove swamp cut sight lines to the city, and the approach path of descending lighters lay directly over the house, which explained why this wasn’t more popular property. That, and the inconvenience of being an hour and a half by scoot or boat from the city.

He’d wait for Cricket to leave, and then he’d slip close enough to get an overview of the location. It would be better if he could catch Spivak away from home, but it didn’t hurt to know the turf. He’d have to be careful, though; Jean Kroc’s house was a homestead, no plans on record, and he had no idea what sort of security devices the conjure man might use. Anything from tiger pits to tracking lasers were possible, and it would be embarrassing to take a load of buckshot in the fundament. André folded his arms and waited, listening to the women laugh. The breeze across the water was cool, carrying a taint of the heady sweetness from the parasitic flowers that swathed the paramangrove limbs. The scent carried over miles, and right now it told André that the wind was offshore. Which was also helpful to him; even if Kroc had a sniffer or a smart guard dog, it wouldn’t pick up André’s scent. Yep. Luck was wonderful.

Pity he couldn’t talk any conjure on Greene’s World into helping him train it. Ah, well. He shifted on the hard seat of the scooter, pretending resignation to himself. No matter how much of a hurry Closs was in, it wasn’t as if André had to kill anybody
tonight
.

Except it didn’t look like Cricket was leaving alone. She climbed into the passenger chair of the waiting flashboat, and Spivak followed, settling in the pilot’s seat. If she was just running Cricket down to the ferry, about fifteen minutes, then—

—André might not need the research after all. More luck, that he hadn’t mentioned it to Cricket. It could have put a strain on the relationship.

The engine of the flashboat was faster and louder than the caterpillar drive on the scoot. André waited until his prey was in motion before powering up. His scoot was dark gray, and the topcoat had a gloss-or-matte option that got a lot of work on night jobs. With the lowlight, he didn’t need the running lights.

He concentrated very hard, thinking of Spivak dropping Cricket off at the ferry landing, just the other side of the paramangrove swamp, and turning back for home, maybe a little careless and tired. He couldn’t take a blacked-out scoot into the city; if he didn’t get run down by a barge, he’d get pulled over by traffic enforcement—and Cricket might recognize him or the vehicle under conditions of more light. The ideal, of course, would be for her to drop off Cricket, turn around, head home, and run into engine trouble. Unfortunately, André didn’t think his untrained mojo was enough to pull off that set of coincidences, but he held the thought anyway, sharp and fine, visualizing it in detail. But Spivak guided the flashboat toward the lights of Novo Haven. The universe wasn’t listening. Or somebody else’s free will was getting in the way again. Just plain inconvenient. She opened quite a gap as she headed inward—his craft wasn’t as speedy—but André wasn’t worried. It shouldn’t matter, as long as he could spot her running lights and the silhouette of her boat across open water.

Traffic was light at first, and there were no street-or channel-lights on the outskirts, other than the occasional door or dock lamp. But the traffic regs assured that Spivak couldn’t just flash off and leave his slower vehicle behind. André made up some of the distance and then slotted his scoot in behind a water taxi two vehicles behind Spivak and Cricket.

He didn’t even need to follow that closely. It was obvious pretty quickly that they were going to Cricket’s new flat. André hadn’t been there yet, but he had the address, and it was a neighborhood he knew.

He stuck close anyway, though, the tactile rubber of the scoot’s handlebars molding his palms, the engine softly vibrating his calves. He pulled a hooded sweater on one arm at a time—keeping his eye on traffic—and slipped on eye protection. Too dark for dark glass in the goggles, but they changed the line of his face a little. He skinned the beard off, which wouldn’t help if either woman was running connex, but he knew Cricket at least usually kept her skins live. She hypertexted like a mad thing in conversation, her agile brain tending to shoot off in six unrelated directions at once. The scoot was a quiet little craft, and André was glad of that as he ducked it out of the traffic stream one bridge shy of Cricket’s flat and diagonally across the channel. They unloaded quickly—a small favor from fate—and Cricket gave Spivak a one-armed hug as she climbed past her before turning away. André crushed a pang of conscience. He’d be there to console her. It might even bring them closer together. Cricket had this unnerving tendency to flit just out of reach, as if she were covered in something slick and transparent. You could brush against her surface, but there was never any way to get a grip. A minute later, Spivak finished fussing with her safety belts and pulled away from the landing, headed in the opposite direction, not back across the side channel where André lay in wait. He twisted the throttle and sent the scoot forward, pulling into traffic smoothly to avoid attracting attention. Now his heart thumped his breastbone. The crackle of tension spidered up his back to grab and prickle across his shoulder blades, and his stomach seemed to sway in his gut like a ballast bag of wet sand. His skin crawled taut across his thighs and groin; nausea chased bitterness up the back of his throat. This was it.

The luck was running now.

It was ninety minutes before he got his shot. Spivak stayed in the city, visited a tavern André didn’t follow her into—it was on a decommissioned ferry, moored along the east side of Broadbrook, and there was no way off it that wasn’t immediately obvious—and returned to her flashboat after less than forty-five minutes. It might have been the meet, but his job wasn’t to stop the meet, or to identify the other party. He didn’t do that sort of thing.

Afterward she headed west, out of the city on bayside. Not back the way they had come, but this was a shorter route out of the city and she could always cut across the shipping lanes for a nearly direct route back to Kroc’s house—a shortcut that would be ideal for André’s purposes. Not only did lighters kick up a hell of a splash when they touched down—a splash that could turn over a small craft—but big ships sometimes didn’t notice little boats, and accidents could happen.

André didn’t like to smile over his work; it seemed disrespectful. But it was hard to keep this one down: maybe prayer was good for something.

He should have stuck to his demand to be paid a bonus for a twenty-four-hour closure. The only potential problem was the top speed of his scoot. If Spivak raced home, there was no way he could keep up. But if she was cutting the lanes, she’d want to proceed cautiously, with one eye on the sky. That would be better.

And it seemed to be her plan. André hung back almost a half-kilometer, trailing Spivak until they were well clear of Novo Haven. The submerged lights of the shipping lanes glowed beneath the surface of the bay, but there was no real danger of being caught against them; they were meant to be seen from above. Only one lighter splashed down during the transect, and that one well off to the south and gently enough that by the time the wake reached André, he cut across it diagonally and noticed only what the skip and lurch did in his already nervous belly. The night was calm, still warmer than he’d expected, and the breeze from landward had faded off, leaving a few late-traveling sailboats motoring along the placid surface with their white sails hanging slack. Spivak, charting a stately progress, seemed inclined to enjoy the night. André had no problem with letting her do it. It was a point of honor with him that his targets never even knew they were in danger. Necessity did not have to be cruel. Around the middle of the landing field, he goosed it. The caterpillar drive wasn’t fast, but it was fast enough if Spivak didn’t hear him coming, and quiet enough that she shouldn’t. He set the autocruise, looped his hard memory, and—keeping one eye on the sky and the other on his quarry—began to assemble his weapon.

In most cases, André killed with a long-barreled sniping weapon, a combination rifle brand-named Locutor A.G. 351, for the year the design had been introduced. It adapted to either caseless standard ammunition—jacketed projectiles fired by a chemical accelerant—or crystalline slivers of hemorragine fired by compressed air, which dissolved in the victim’s blood, causing symptoms of a cerebral aneurysm, then broke down into innocuous organic compounds within the day. That was what he would be using tonight. He preferred a bullet; it killed instantly if you did it right, whereas the hemorragine left the victim sometimes as long as a hundred and twenty seconds to feel fear. And that was ugly and cruel.

The other issue with the damned things was they didn’t fly far, and a fairly light cross breeze could deflect them. He’d have to be within a hundred meters, and he wouldn’t get more than a couple of shots. Even in the wee hours of morning, people tended to notice when someone pointed a rifle at them and fired poisoned needles at the back of their heads.