Carnival-SA (21 page)

Once the wardrobe contracted, he slithered down the curved roofline to drop to street level, earning another twinge from his knee. He checked the map; the meeting place was one square over, in the open. No proof against listening devices, but if his suspicions were right, a member of security directorate would be making sure no records remained.

He slipped through the crowds into darkness, following the map through quieter streets. There were only a few reeling revelers here, and he avoided them easily. Somewhere in the distance, he heard fireworks or gunfire.

He fully expected that the shadow awaiting him in the darkness under an arched walkway would be Lesa Pretoria. He hadn’t been sure until that evening, but the complex of her kinetics over dinner had convinced him, though she’d never dropped a recognition code. He paused in shadows to cancel the camouflage, dressed in local fashion and mocked up something that would pass from a distance for a street license with a quick accessory program—he didn’t have a license for a hat, but he had one for a wrist cuff—and presented himself boldly alongside the arch, circumnavigating merrymakers as he went, restraining the urge to press his hand to his aching shoulder. The pain was nauseating. He was drawing a breath to greet Miss Pretoria when an entirely different voice interrupted him, and a woman older and stouter than Lesa stepped into the light. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said. “I’m pleased you could get away.”

“Elder Kyoto,” he choked. “This is a surprise.”

Once Kusanagi-Jones reached street level and slipped into the night, he moved faster. The unrippled pavement was sun-warm under his feet, and he had little trouble winding through the scattered revelers by Gorgon-light. The gallery lay across the square. Penthesilea’s government center was compact, and it wasn’t the center of the party. Kusanagi-Jones only had to cope with the overflow. He heard music from elsewhere in the city, cheers and laughter that suggested a parade or theatrical event. He triggered the full-circle display, the fisheye appearing in the lower corner of his sight where peripheral vision would pick it up. Years of training meant he’d react to it as fast as to a flicker in the corner of his eye, and as accurately.

He passed between drunks and singers, hesitated at the report of gunfire and an echoing siren. Four shots, but they were distant and spaced like a duel, and though heads turned, nobody reacted more strongly. He crept around to the back of the gallery, to the broad doors where more trucks of repatriated art were being unloaded and the protectively wrapped bundles carted in, to be hung in accordance with the afternoon’s plan.

He skulked inside.

The lifts were running regularly. He simply stepped into an empty one, rode it down, ducked around a group of incoming laborers—mostly licensed men, and two armed women—and found himself at liberty in the gallery space.

The instructions Miss Ouagadougou had provided were quite precise. He crossed the first gallery and ascended the stair under the watchful eyes of the frieze. When he reached the far corner, he paused. This adventure would have been considerably less nerve-wracking if there were some mechanical means of opening the passage, something that could be hacked or bypassed.

If Vincent was right, there was a machine intelligence watching him. And Kusanagi-Jones could only hope its instructions didn’t include the casual destruction of off-world human males poking about where they shouldn’t be.

It wasn’t as long a gamble as it seemed. He had, at best, speculation that the city might take action if it construed a major threat to its inhabitants—such as a ships’ complement of Coalition marines. But Penthesilea remained an alien artifact, and if it could be efficiently reprogrammed or trained, he had no hope of carrying out his mission. And yet, here he was, against reason and sanity, doing what he did in the hope it didn’t have protocols in place to deal with saboteurs and spies. It was the old ambiguity that set his heart racing and dumped adrenaline into his bloodstream. Nobody sane would be here. But then, nobody sane would have taken this job in the first place. Especially when the most likely scenario, in the wake of the afternoon’s attempt on Vincent, had Miss Ouagadougou luring him to a lonely place where he could be abducted or disappeared. He lowered the audio damping, checked the fisheye display to make sure the gallery floor was clear, and asked House, please, to open the wall.

Before he finished speaking, the frieze before him parted like drawn curtains. He stepped forward into an arched tunnel, unsurprised when the opening sealed itself behind him. An indirect glow rendered his light amplification redundant; he dialed it down, but in deference to his mistrust of Miss Ouagadougou he left the camouflage protocol intact.

The tunnel was undecorated, smooth sided, the walls velvety and dark. It tended downward, the walls corded with shielded cables. Lesser ran into greater to form a vast, inverted mechanical root system, which thickened toward a trunk as he descended. The overall effect was Gigeresque, though the textures were more reminiscent of Leighton’s velvets and silks.

He breathed easier. It was an access tunnel. Which meant, at least potentially, that Miss Ouagadougou had sent him to the right place. “Thank you,” he said, feeling slightly foolish. The city didn’t answer, but neither did the ongoing sense of observation (like a pressure between his shoulder blades) ease. He snorted softly when he realized he had expected it to, and kept walking. Brightness spilled up the corridor as it leveled. He paused to let his eyes adapt. His wardrobe handled dazzle, but didn’t ensure fine perception.

Fifteen seconds sufficed. He blinked once more, to be sure, and stepped forward into a chamber not much larger than the suite he shared with Vincent. It was bowl shaped, the walls arching to meet overhead in a smooth, steep-sided dome. He knew he was underground, but the depth of field in the images surrounding him was breathtaking. They were not just projected into the walls, but a full holographic display.

If it weren’t for the tug of gravity on his boots, he might have been adrift in space. New Amazonia’s primary, Kali, glowed enormous and bittersweet orange on his left hand, smeared behind watercolor veils. On his right, totally out of perspective, floated New Amazonia, a cloud-marbled berry with insignificant ice caps, incrementally closer to its primary than Earth was to Sol, partially shielded from Kali’s greater energy output by the Gorgon’s polychrome embrace.

The fisheye showed him stars on every side. He turned toward the sun. And a peculiar thing happened. The nebula dimmed, parted along his line of sight, and left him staring at the filtered image of Kali. He knew it was filtered, because his wardrobe wasn’t blinking override warnings about staring into it, and everything around it didn’t flicker dim as the utility fog struggled to compensate. The bruise-limned darkness of sunspots hung vivid against the glare, the ceaseless fidgeting of the corona marked abruptly by the dolphin leap of a solar arch. It seemed close enough to reach out his hand and touch, enormous, though his palm at full extension eclipsed the sphere.

Teeth rolling his lower lip, Kusanagi-Jones returned to New Amazonia. The veils swept back from it as well, focus tightening, and as the holographic point of view swept in, he found himself retracing the rough course of the lighter that had brought him to this planet. He circled Penthesilea, and there the image hesitated. Waiting, he realized. Hovering like a butterfly on trembling wingbeats, accommodating the wind.

“House, show me the power generation system, please.”

The image swooped again. A flying creature’s preferred perspective, as internal decor mimicking wide open spaces and empty skies would be comforting to a creature with wings, where an ape’s descendent might feel cozy with limited perspectives and broken sight lines, the indication of places to hide. The sense of falling made his fingers flex, trying to clutch a railing that wasn’t there. He mastered himself, despite the sense that there was nothing to stand on as images rushed past incomprehensibly fast. And then they paused, arrested sharply, and he found himself staring at the back of his own head, the wooly curls of a dark man in a star-spangled room.

His fisheye—and his own eyes—showed him that the image
he
watched hadn’t changed. But the room around the virtual Kusanagi-Jones dissolved, vanished into clear air, leaving him standing at the bottom of a sphere whose every surface writhed with twisted cable. It was a strangely organic growth, fractal in the way it merged and combined, coming together in a massive, downward-tending trunk beneath Kusanagi-Jones’s feet.

The hologram had stripped away the chamber’s walls, showing him what lay behind them. His neck chilled. He rubbed his palms against his thighs. “Follow the cables, please.”

The perspective zoomed down—
through
him, and he blinked at the glimpse of meat and bone and wiring and a momentary cross-section of a pulsing heart—and chased the tunneling cables down, down, to bedrock and a cavern in the depth-warmed darkness.

He was no electrical engineer. But an encyclopedic education, RAM-assisted parsing, and the information he’d chipped when he came out of cryo identified most of the machinery. Capacitors, transformers, batteries, a bank of quantum processors big enough to run a starship: essentially, an electrical substation the size of some Earth cities.

And no sign whatsoever of a
generator
. Just the power endlessly flowing from the quantum array—

From
the quantum array.

“Shit,” Kusanagi-Jones said. He had an excellent memory. He could recall Elder Singapore’s slightly amused tone precisely, as she had said,
But you can’t get there from here.
“The power source isn’t on this planet.”

A flicker of motion in his fisheye alerted him a split second before an urbane, perfectly modulated voice answered him. He turned, binocular vision better than peripheral, the fisheye snapping down on the sudden motion and giving him a blurred preview that didn’t remotely prepare him. The head that hung over him was a meter long from occiput to muzzle, paved about the mouth and up to the eyes on either side with beady scales that ranged in color from azure to indigo. Flatter scales plated under the jaw and down the throat, creamy ivory and sunrise-yellow. A fluff of threadlike feathers began as a peach-and-cream crest between the eyes, broadened to a mane on the neck and down the spine, spread across the flanks, and downed the outside of the thighs. The forelimbs, folded tight against the animal’s ribs, raised towering spikes on either side of its shoulders—the outermost fingers of hands that were curled under to support the front half.

Support it couldn’t have needed, because the entire four-meter-long animal was lucently transparent. It was a projection.

“You are wrong,
esthelich
Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones. Planetary margins are irrelevant. The cosmocline is not in this
brane,
” the ghost of a Dragon said, and paused before it continued.

“Good morning,
esthelich
. Kii greets you. Kii is explorer-caste. Kii speaks for the Consent.”

The Mortification of the Flesh

13

“YOU OPPOSE CONSENT,” KII SAID, THE SPIKED TIPS OF folded wings canting back as it settled onto its haunches, knuckles extended before it like a crouching dog’s paws. Its long neck stretched, dipping slightly at the center as it brought its head to Kusanagi-Jones’s level. Its phantom tongue flicked out, hovered in the air, tested, considered. “You are disloyal.”

Kusanagi-Jones had no answer. He was poised, defensively, ready to move, to attack or evade. But there was nothing here he could touch, and the creature’s capabilities were unmeasured. It paused, though, cocking its head side to side as if to judge distance, and nictitating membranes wiped across wide golden eyes. It seemed to consider. “Perfidious,” it tried, and Kusanagi-Jones could see that the thing wasn’t actually speaking. The voice was generated stereophonically, so it seemed to originate near Kii’s mouth—if Kii was the animal’s name, and not its species identifier or a personal pronoun or something Kusanagi-Jones wasn’t even thinking of—but the mouth didn’t work around the words, and its breathing flared and flexed nostrils, uninterrupted. “Treasonous,” it considered, lingering over the flavor of the word, and then shook its head like a bird shaking off water. “Disloyal,” it decided gravely.

“You are disloyal.”

Michelangelo found himself quite unintentionally disarmed by this haphazard pedantry, though he fought it. He straightened, breathing slowly, and let his hands fall to his sides. He kept his balance light, weight centered on the balls of his feet. He would move if he had to and try to look calm in the meantime. The preliminary indicators were that Kii was nonaggressive. It might be a sort of…user-friendly interface bot designed for a Dragon. The alien’s equivalent of an application assistant.

“Request clarification,” Kusanagi-Jones said.

Kii’s tongue flickered. It settled another notch, lowering itself to its transparent belly, drawing its head back, neck a sinuous curve. The tension in Kusanagi-Jones’s gut untwisted another notch, the lizard in the back of his skull reacting to a lowering of threat level—as if the Dragon’s appearance of ease mattered at all. Any attack, if it came, need have nothing to do with a hologram; a laser concealed in a wall port would suffice.

“You are a member of a population in competition with the local population,” Kii said. “But your transmissions indicate that your allegiance to your own population is…” It paused again, head rocking and eyes upcast. Kusanagi-Jones imagined the Dragon was searching for an unfamiliar word again.

“—spurious.”

Kusanagi-Jones licked his lips. It wasn’t
technically
a question. More an observation. Maybe he could return a question of his own. “Are you House? Wait, belay that. Are you the intelligence known as House?”

“Kii is…”

Kusanagi-Jones thought that the approximations occurred when it was searching for a word in New Amazonia’s patois that matched a concept in its own language. He waited it out.