Carnival-SA (10 page)

“Just as well,” Vincent said, releasing Kusanagi-Jones’s arm after one more caress. “What do you do when you’re not shepherding visiting dignitaries, Warden?”

She shrugged. “You just met my boss. I’m security directorate. I review licensing for gentle males and others.”

“Political officer,” Vincent said. She wasn’t tall, but she moved with direction and strength. If she had been wearing boots, they would have been thumping on the groundcover. Even the security detail was hustling to keep up.

She flipped her hair behind her ear again. It kept escaping in ways a grooming license would not permit.

“You could say that.”

The curved corridor opened into a bell-shaped chamber. She selected a side corridor. Kusanagi-Jones noticed she was running the tips of her fingers down the left-hand wall. “Just here—”

Another room, this one long and narrow like a gallery. The walls were the faux-transparent type, the ceiling view of a perfect, cloudless night sky.

“This is the museum?” Kusanagi-Jones asked. “Where’s the art? Doesn’t the sunlight damage it?”

Miss Pretoria smiled, seeming pleased that he’d broken his silence, but she addressed them both as she waved them forward. “It’s downstairs,” she said. “Underground. Come along.”

Penthesilea looked small on the surface, but Kusanagi-Jones had gained a hard-won appreciation for how rarely appearances matched actuality. After the arena, he wasn’t surprised by the scale of the underground city.

They stepped from a lift into a cavernous space. The air here was cool, the illumination indirect, bright but soothing, with long splashes of light reflecting from scrollworked eggshell-white walls. Vincent cleared his throat. After glancing at Miss Pretoria for permission, Vincent reached out and softly ran his hand over the decorations, if that was what they were. Kusanagi-Jones resisted the urge, despite the tactile charm. Vincent said, “If the original inhabitants—”

“The Dragons.”

“The Dragons. If they could fly, why the lift?”

“It’s new.”

“Do you understand the technology that well?” And Vincent made it sound casual, startled. Natural. Kusanagi-Jones wondered if Pretoria was fooled.

Truthfully, though, he listened with only half an ear to the conversation. His attention was on the security detail, the multidimensional echoes caused by the cavern’s organic shapes, the possibility of an attack. He was surprised by how freely they were permitted to move; on Earth, there would have been an entourage, press, a gaggle of functionaries. Here, there was just the three of them, and the guards. Convenient.
And
indicative of even more societal differences that would be positively treacherous to navigate. As if the openly armed women hadn’t been enough of a hint.

“…this seems like a very fine facility,” Vincent said. He moved casually, his hands in his pockets as he leaned down to Miss Pretoria, diminishing her disadvantage in height. “Controlled humidity and temperature, of course.”

“Yes. These are the galleries that were emptied by the OECC robbers in the Six-Weeks-War,” she said. Her body language gave no hint that she considered any potential to offend in her phrasing. It was matter-of-fact, impersonal.

And this is a diplomat,
Kusanagi-Jones thought. He trailed one hand along the wall; the texture was soapy, almost soft. He imagined a faint vibration again, as before, but when he tuned to it, he thought it might just be the wind swaying the fluted towers so far overhead.
They’ve been alone out here a very
long time. Long enough that awareness of ethnocentrism is a historical curiosity.
He stroked the wall again, trying to identify the material. It didn’t come off on his fingers, but it felt like it
should
. Like graphite or soapstone—slick without actually being greasy. There was a geologist’s term, but he couldn’t remember it.

“These galleries?” Vincent said. “This is where the Coalition troops…”

“Were killed, yes.”
This
subject, Miss Pretoria seemed to understand might be touchy. “The ones who came to repatriate the art. And New Amazonia. Seven hundred. Give or take.”

“A ship’s complement of marines.”

“We warned them to withdraw. They attempted to disarm us.”

Kusanagi-Jones glanced over in time to catch that predatory flash of her teeth once more. Vincent was watching her, his hands still in his pockets, his face calm.

“There’s been a lot of practical experiment on what happens after the occupiers disarm the locals. Just because we’ve disavowed Old Earth history doesn’t mean we fail to study it. You can file that one with
sense of humor,
if you like.”

Kusanagi-Jones felt the thrum between them, Vincent and Pretoria. Her chin was up, defiant. Vincent stood there, breathing, smiling, for her to bash herself against. For a moment, Kusanagi-Jones pitied her; she didn’t stand a chance. Vincent’s silences were even more devastating than his sarcasm. He ended this one with a soft, beckoning gesture, something that invited Miss Pretoria into the circle of his confidences. “I don’t suppose you’d consent to tell me how you managed to herd or lure an entire ship’s complement into these chambers, Miss Pretoria? Just as a goodwill gesture, something to get negotiations off on a congenial foot?”

She tilted her head. “You never know when we might need it again. And speaking of goodwill gestures, do you have a list of the art treasures you’re returning?”

“One wasn’t sent ahead?”

“One was,” she answered. She started walking again. Vincent accompanied her and Kusanagi-Jones fell in closer to the security detail. “But since we’ve planned that repatriation ceremony for tomorrow, it doesn’t hurt to make sure we’re all working from the same assumptions.”

Her tone made it plain she knew they weren’t, but was willing to play the game. Kusanagi-Jones found himself admiring her a little. More than a little; she had sangfroid, an old-fashioned haggler’s nerve. Maybe she’d known exactly what she was doing with that too-sharp word
robbers
. Her next comment clinched it. “If you’ll follow me,” she said, “I’ll show you some things that
weren’t
stolen.”

Vincent, surprising everyone except Kusanagi-Jones, laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a week. Kusanagi-Jones laughed, too. But he was laughing at the startled expression on Pretoria’s face.

“About that sense of humor—”

She grinned, and he remembered the sharpness with which she’d returned the volley after overhearing the unflattering nickname. “You’re not going to tell me men have one, too?”

Vincent shot him a look; Kusanagi-Jones answered with a shrug. They passed through three chambers, each one with soft full-spectrum light and stairs ascending to a gallery, each with white walls bare and smooth as the walls of a chalk cave.

“How much did they take?” Vincent asked. Even hushed, his voice echoed into many-layered resonance.

“All this?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know what we brought. The lists I transferred.”

She smiled. “That’s maybe a twentieth of it—”

“The
Christ
.”

“Mmm. These vaults were on the surface then, public galleries. A museum. We brought what we could from Old Earth—”

“Women’s art,” Kusanagi-Jones said, but he was thinking
On the surface? All this?

She stopped and turned, her shoulders square and her chin lifted. She folded her hands behind her back.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“I wondered why your ancestors limited the collection.”

She gave him that smile again, the toothy one. “Somebody else was taking care of the rest.”

“You’re content with the bias?”

She turned and kept walking. Another half of one of the big rooms in silence, until she paused beside a wall like any other. She lifted her hand and pressed the palm against the surface. “Are you content with yours?”

Before he could answer, the wall scrolled open and a door created itself where there hadn’t been a door a moment before. She stepped through before the edges had finished collapsing seamlessly into themselves, and Kusanagi-Jones had an awful moment of clarity. It came to him, lead-crystal sharp, that he needed to be thinking of this city not as static structures, but as the biggest damned fog this side of a starship. But Vincent didn’t look worried, so Kusanagi-Jones made sure he didn’t look worried either and followed Pretoria through the gap. He stopped so fast that Vincent ran into him. The contents of this room were intact. It was a hundred meters long, with three galleried levels of well-hung walls, plinths and stands scattered about the floor. He had taken three steps forward, sliding out from under Vincent’s steadying hand on his shoulder, before he even thought to turn and ask their warden for permission. Still smiling, she waved him forward. Vincent dogged him, and he couldn’t even be bothered to be offended when Pretoria called after him, “Don’t touch!” although he did growl something about being housebroken, under his breath.

He folded his hands ostentatiously in the small of his back, and tried to remember not to hold his breath. There were pieces here Michelangelo couldn’t even name, although he had—many years since—taken a class in the treasures that had been lost during Diaspora, and he’d chipped all the relevant records before he left Earth.

Vincent leaned over his shoulder, breath warm on his ear, resting a hand on his shoulder where the skin of his fingers could brush Michelangelo’s neck. It was scarcely a distraction. He paused in front of a case with a long, chain-linked silver necklace, as much sculpture as it was jewelry, hung on a display rack like a barren branch. His chip told him the name.

“Matthesen,” he said, pointing with his chin so as not to give Pretoria an excuse to shoot him. “
Fear
Death by Water
. Supposed to be lost.” He knew the white marble miniature of a nude and pensive woman beside it without help. “Vinnie Ream Hoxie’s
The Spirit of the Carnival
. These must all be North American. That’s Jana Sterbak’s
The Dress
—”

Vincent didn’t even comment on the power required to keep the lights that shimmered words in archaic English burning across the wirework form. “That’s art?”

“Heathen,” Michelangelo said, more fondly than he intended. “Yes, it’s art. And oh…”

It caught his eye from across the room, a swirl of colors that seemed at first an amorphous form on a starry field, a nebula in dank earthen green and mahogany. A heavy tentacled brown arm reached from the upper left-hand corner of the canvas, shoving at the sky like an oppressive hand. Michelangelo gasped with the power of it, the vault, the weight, the
mass
. Just paint on canvas, and after he practically ran across the room to it, it shoved him back a step.

Vincent, who had followed him, swallowed but didn’t speak.

“The Lawrence Tree,”
Michelangelo said. He didn’t need to look at the plaque. “Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“I’ve heard of her,” Vincent said. He almost sounded surprised. “What’s this one?”

Michelangelo didn’t know. He waved a question at Pretoria.

The warden came to them, as if reluctant to shout now that they were thick in the spell of the gallery.

“Saide Austin is the artist,” she said, and Michelangelo took a moment to appreciate the irony of a woman named after a city named after a man. “It’s called
Jinga Mbande
.”

It was wood, Michelangelo thought, darkly polished, the image of a well-armed woman with upthrust breasts pointed like weapons, the strong curve of her belly hinting at fecundity. She held a primitive firearm in one hand, a spear in the other, and had the sort of classically African features that were rarely even seen on Earth anymore. “An Amazon heroine?”

“A freedom fighter,” Pretoria said. She stood silent on his left hand as Vincent waited on his right, and they all breathed in the silence of the rich gleam of light on polished wood. The air was cool and smelled faintly of lemon oil.

“Old Earth history,” she said then, and stepped away as if she needed to cut the camaraderie that had almost grown between them. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the friezes.”

They went. Up a spiral stair—
neck-breaking-type,
Vincent mouthed at him as they climbed—to the third and final gallery. As they reached the landing, Miss Pretoria about a dozen steps ahead of them, Kusanagi-Jones leaned forward and whispered in Vincent’s ear, “If this is where the marines were killed, was Montevideo’s comment a veiled threat?”

Vincent coughed. “Pretty well-cursed veiled.” And then he looked up and fell silent. Kusanagi-Jones hadn’t been prepared to be struck dumb again.
You’d think you’d run out of awe
eventually.
And perhaps one would. But not right away.

The friezes, as Montevideo had so blithely called them, were a single long strip about three meters tall that ran the entire perimeter of the room. They had subtle detail and deep refractive color that washed to white when you weren’t looking at them directly, so they faded out as one glanced along their length, ghosts emerging and vanishing. At first he wasn’t sure if the images actually moved, but he occasionally stopped and stared at one detail or another, and became aware that the scene shifted, playing itself out in slow animation.

And he understood why the New Amazonians called the long-lost native aliens
Dragons
. The pictured creatures were feathered almost-serpents, four-limbed counting the wings and the legs that helped anchor the flight membranes. The wings were bony and double-jointed, shaped for walking on and manipulating things as well as flight. The vane was stretched skin over an elongated pinkie finger that formed the longest part of the leading edge of the wing, five more fingers making a grasping appendage at the front of the joint. They were neither bat-wings nor bird-wings, despite the hairy feathers—or feathery fur—that covered the creatures’ backs and napes and heads.

The Dragons flocked through the spires of what must be one of the other cities of New Amazonia, because it was far taller and more towered than Penthesilea, and they raced clouds in jewel-bright colors. The ones in the foreground were as detailed as Audubon paintings. The ones in the background were movement itself. In among them were wingless animals, four legged, like lean reptilian jackals. They reminded Michelangelo of some kind of feathered dinosaur, what a theropod would look like if it ran on all fours.