Carnival-SA (20 page)

A warm hand rested above his elbow. Too warm, and Vincent was shivering. “The ship. Remember her?”

Kusanagi-Jones turned, eyesight adapting, collecting heat-signatures and available light. “Your temperature is up.”

“Sunburn,” Vincent said. “Robert warned me. I’m cold.”

Which was an interesting problem. “How much does it hurt?”

“I’ve got chemistry,” Vincent answered. Which was Vincent for
a lot
. He didn’t use it if he could avoid it.

“May I touch you?”

“Please.”

But when he reached around Vincent’s shoulders, Vincent yelped behind clenched teeth. Kusanagi-Jones jerked his hand back. “I’m more sore than I thought,” he said.

“How’s your chest?”

“Not bad. Not as bad. Just a little sore at the top.”

“Well then.” Kusanagi-Jones flopped on his back, shaking the bed, and tented the covers. “Get comfortable.”

Vincent slid over him, a blessed blanket of warmth in the chill of the over-climate-controlled night. Kusanagi-Jones was used to sleeping warm everywhere but on starships, and he found himself sighing, relaxing, as Vincent spread out against his chest. Vincent made a little sad sound and stiffened when the blankets fell against his back, but settled in once his wardrobe established an air cushion. He propped himself on his elbows so he could look Kusanagi-Jones in the face.
“Skidbladnir.”

“What about it? Seventeen years ago.” Kusanagi-Jones rearranged himself so Vincent could stretch comfortably between his legs. In the middle distance, someone was singing, and he shifted uncomfortably, remembering the dead man on his litter.

“It was the last time—”

When they were still half convinced they could keep their relationship a secret. When they thought they
had,
and the sex had, all too often, been furtive and hasty, and—

“Yes.” The words scratching his throat. “I remember.”

“Do you remember what you said to me?”

He knows,
Kusanagi-Jones thought. He stroked Vincent’s hip lightly, feeling heat and skin slick with moisturizer and analgesic. “Told you,” he said, picking over each word, “no matter what happened, I wanted you to know I—” He shrugged. It wasn’t something he had the courage to say twice in one lifetime. “I did. Want you to know.”

“And something happened.”

“Yeah.” Kusanagi-Jones closed his eyes, filtering out the charcoal-sketch outline of Vincent’s face. “Had to eventually.”

“I didn’t answer at the time,” Vincent said. “I—”

Michelangelo reacted fast. Just fast enough to get his hands into Vincent’s braids—careful of his burned neck—and pull Vincent’s mouth down to his own before Vincent could say anything stupid. Before Vincent could give him back his own words of nearly two decades before. Vincent’s voice trailed off in a mumble that buzzed against Michelangelo’s lips for a moment before Vincent’s mouth opened, wet, yielding, returning fierceness for fierceness and strength for strength. The confession, however it might have begun, turned into a pleased, liquid moan. Teeth clicked and tongues slid, and Michelangelo arched his spine to press their groins together, not daring to hook his ankles over the backs of Vincent’s calves. Vincent pulled back, panting, drawing the scratchy cords of his braids through Michelangelo’s fingers.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” he ordained.
“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Vincent asked, archly, lowering his head to claim another kiss.

“Nothing interesting.”

Gray on gray in Michelangelo’s augmented sight, Vincent’s eyebrows rose.
Nothing,
Michelangelo thought,
because I’m going to sabotage this mission, too. Because I’m going to give you up again. I
have it in my hands, sod it, and I don’t…care…enough to sacrifice a whole culture for you.
So I’m going to help New Amazonia get away, the
same way I helped New Earth get away, and
they’re going to take me away from you again.

What he said was, “Vincent. Your turn tonight.”

Kii understands. The bipeds do this themselves. They choose. As the Consent chooses, in its own
time. The way of life is growth and consumption, blind fulfillment.
This is not the way of the Consent. As the Consent chooses to enter a virtual space and achieve a
burdenless immortality, the bipeds, unpredatored, invent a predator. Something that keeps them
in balance. Something that kills their culls, forces them to evolve when they outstrip their native
predators.

A stroke of genius. An entire society bent to poetry.

They are
esthelich,
after all.

Vincent waited while Angelo pushed the pillows aside and stretched on his stomach, breathing shallowly until Vincent covered Michelangelo with his body again, licking the warm curve of Angelo’s ear as Angelo turned his head to breathe. Vincent caught Angelo’s hands in his own and pressed them to the bed. Playing at restraint.

Angelo squirmed, panting, muscle rippling as he pushed against Vincent, so powerful and so contained, and so soft where it counted. He had always loved this, loved and feared it, rarely permitted it, almost never asked. He hated letting anybody, even Vincent—perhaps especially Vincent—far enough inside his armor to see the vulnerabilities underneath. To see him need
anything.
And he would never forgive Vincent if he understood how transparent he was, in this one particular, and how well Vincent understood this aspect of his psyche. Because Michelangelo was a Liar—and while Vincent couldn’t tell when Angelo was lying, he knew how it worked. Their talents were the same at the root. But Angelo’s was broken.

Vincent had been born with a cognitive giftedness. He was a superperceiver. Michelangelo had the same gift. And if he had grown up in the environment Vincent had, chances were he would have been as skilled at understanding and compromise and gentle manipulation. But he’d been raised under harsher circumstances, and Michelangelo’s gift had been shaped by a history of verbal abuse and neglect into something else. Where a less talented child would have been driven into a borderline personality, Michelangelo had been warped into a perfect machine for survival. A chameleon, a shape shifter. A glossy exterior that showed only the reflection of the person looking in. Except for now, when Michelangelo lifted himself, asking, and Vincent came to him. Exertion stung the tender skin on Vincent’s back and buttocks and sweat dripped into his eyes, scattering over Michelangelo’s shoulders as Angelo stretched under him. Vincent’s wardrobe was overloading again; he didn’t care. Headfucks and Venus flytraps and feedback loops were all right, but they didn’t satisfy the inner animal the way good, old-fashioned, biological
sex
did. Heart rate, brain chemistry, blood pressure—it all benefited from this: competition, cooperation,
intercourse
. Conversation, as much game as release.

He rocked against Angelo, hands and mouth busy on whatever he could reach. Michelangelo answered him with sounds that might have indicated pain, if they hadn’t come in tandem with the eager motions of his hips and the clench of his hands in the bedclothes. Michelangelo flexed to meet his final, savage demands, and then they slumped together and pooled, relaxing.

Everything’s better with a friend,
Vincent thought, snorting with laughter.

“Glad to know I amuse you,” replied the dryly muffled voice, Michelangelo slipping into their code. Vincent resettled against his back, racing heartbeats synchronizing. “What did that Ouagadougou woman want with you?”

“You caught that?” Angelo sounded sleepy. “One of ours.”

“Coalition?”

“Mmm. Our contact. Slipped me a map this afternoon. Might do some exploring in a bit.”

“Alone?”

“Easier to countermeasure one than two, and I spent more time in the gallery than you did.”

“What’s the gallery got to do with anything?”

“Seems to be how you get there, if I’m reading this thing right—” Shoulders already whisked dry by utility fogs rose and fell against Vincent’s chest. “What’d you find out?”

Vincent thought of the unexamined chip concealed under the table edge, and dropped his chin on Angelo’s shoulder. “House—The city, I mean. Lesa called it House.”

“Yeah?”

“I think it’s an AI. Not sure if it’s sentient—I mean, self-aware—or not, but it’s sure as hell sapient. It problem-solves. And works from limited data to provide a best-response.”

“Tells us how the marines died.”

“Sure. The city just…lured them where the Elders wanted them brought. And then walled them up. For as long as it took.”

That brought a long silence, and then a sigh. “Hope the countermeasures work.”

Vincent grunted. Michelangelo stretched again, the restless motion of hips and shoulders that meant
get
off me, oaf
.

Vincent rolled clear. “How will you bypass security?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Angelo. “Going to turn invisible.”

Lesa made sure Agnes knew she wouldn’t be expecting Robert that night. She sat before her mirror, combing the brighteners into her hair, and contemplated the blankness with which Vincent had met her code phrase. A code phrase encoded on the chip
he’d
provided, at the meet prearranged by Katherine Lexasdaughter.

Which Robert had taken directly from his hand, palmed, and pressed immediately into hers. Vincent didn’t know who he was to meet on New Amazonia. Couldn’t know, before he made planetfall. It was too dangerous for everyone concerned.

Which was why the elaborate system of double blinds and duplicity. Isolation. Containment. Any good conspiracy needs fire doors. Lesa had required a chance to assess Katherinessen before she—and more important Elena—revealed herself. But when she’d tried to make the final connection…

Robert had palmed the chip and handed it directly to her.

Lesa’s comb stopped in her hair. Robert had also been left alone with Vincent for at least half an hour before Lesa attempted to seal the contact.

She untangled the comb carefully, reversed its field with a touch on the controls, and redacted the brighteners. When her hair was clean, she folded the comb into its slot in the wall and stood. She stepped over Walter to reach the house com on the wall by the door. “House, please contact Agnes.”

A moment later, Agnes answered, and Lesa told her that under no circumstances was Robert to leave the Blue Rooms. Agnes wanted details, and Lesa was forced to admit she had none to offer, “—but trust me on this.”

She was already pulling on her boots as she said it. When House ended the connection, she called through the fabric of a thin black mock-neck for a car. She strapped on her honor, pulled her hair back into a plain tail, and hit the door at a trot.

The car was waiting at the end of the alley. There were some perks to being a government employee.

There were days when Kusanagi-Jones wished he were better at lying to himself, and then there were the days when he was pretty sure he had it down to a science. While Vincent made idle conversation, he split his wardrobe under the covers of the bed they had made love in, left the remainder to assemble a warm, breathing, nanometer-thick shell, and set what he retained to camouflage mode. When he stood up, as promised, he was invisible.

Well, not
truly
invisible. But his wardrobe handled minor issues like refracting light around him through the same process by which it could provide a 360-degree prospect in a combat situation, a lensing effect. It contained his body heat, presenting an ambient-temperature surface to any thermal imaging devices, and it filtered carbon and other emissions.

The drawback was that it would get hot and stuffy in there rather quickly. He would have to move fast. Kusanagi-Jones stood against the wall beside the door as Vincent opened it and called Cathay inside on the excuse of wanting a late snack. She came, yawning, and Kusanagi-Jones slipped past her before the door could iris shut.

The second security agent outside wasn’t Shafaqat. They must be trading off. In any case, she was standing against the wall, admirably placed to see anyone coming in either direction down the short curved hall, but with only a peripheral view of the door at her back. Kusanagi-Jones slipped past in complete silence, the only clue to his passage the dimpling of the carpetplant underfoot. She didn’t notice. The lift was a challenge, but it was out of sight around the curve of the hall. He spoke softly and the door glided open. He stepped inside. He wanted to breathe deeply, to savor feeling alive in his skin and the lingering tenderness of sex. But he kept his breaths short and slow, giving his wardrobe as much help as he could. He couldn’t afford to dwell on pleasant memories when he was here to fail the man who created them.

Vincent waited until Cathay returned with a tray, toast and tea for two. He thanked her, then cleared Angelo’s solar collector from the edge of the open window. He sat on the ledge to eat the toast and drink the tea. Then he climbed back into bed beside the homunculus and repeated Angelo’s trick of mitosis. When he stood, he collected the unviewed chip from its hiding place and slotted it into his reader. The chip contained a map. He studied it while leaning out the window, examining the teeming city below. Then he put one foot up and rose into the frame.

Anyone in the room would have registered nothing. No movement, no shifting of the light except a faint sparkle of mismatched edges if they had happened to look at the window just as he stepped up into it. It was a long way down. Vincent let go of the window frame, lifted his arms, and stepped out. Unlike a parachute, there was no shock as his wardrobe unfurled, growing filaments and tendrils festooned with catch pockets. The air resistance slowed him before he could build up falling velocity. He ballooned down like a spider, steering for a smooth dimple at the base of the tower, and landed squarely where he’d aimed. But faster than he should have; he rolled with it, but his knee twinged, and his wardrobe couldn’t quite absorb the shock enough to protect his sun-seared shoulder. He whimpered when he hit, but the street noise was enough to cover that. In camouflage mode, his wardrobe would damp most of the noise anyway.