Carnival-SA (24 page)

Kusanagi-Jones turned to check before he was certain she was smiling at him. It was a small, tight smile, such that he wondered at the subtext, but a secondary peek at Vincent yielded no further information. He sighed and ran his fingertips across his wrist, activating the sensors in his watch. “Not more chemistry,” Vincent said.

“Just dialing my wardrobe down,” he said. “Hate to zap the minister of produce.”

“Do they have a minister of produce?” Vincent asked, between unmoving lips. Their eyes caught, and Vincent smiled, just with the corner of his eyes.

Michelangelo looked down quickly, disguising the sudden, tight pain in his chest. There had to be a way. There
had
to be a way. There was a way out of everything.

It was just a matter of finding it, and then having the guts to grab it and the strength to hang on. And standing ready to pay the cost. Kusanagi-Jones’s choice was a little too clear cut. He could be loyal, desert Free Earth, and keep Vincent—maybe. If they could pull this off. If he could bring home the brane technology—far more critical to their reception on Earth than any alliance with New Amazonia—it might be enough to buy him Vincent. All it meant was abandoning the ideal of freedom from the Governors that he’d been working toward for thirty years.

He even saw an angle that might work. All he had to do was convince Kii to give it to him as the price of keeping the Coalition out of New Amazonia. Destroying the Consent wouldn’t work. He didn’t think the virtual space they inhabited was housed in the Kali system. Or even in the local universe. If it were him, and he had the technology to manipulate branes, to build himself a pocket universe of his desire, he’d build one where the cosmological rules encouraged a stable existence, or maybe lock it to an event horizon. What was the point of Transcending to virtual immortality if it just meant you still had to die when entropy collected its inevitable toll?

After long consideration of the night’s odd conversation, Kusanagi-Jones even thought he understood the theory. The technology was another issue, of course—but based on what Kii had said, that suggestive word
cosmocline,
and a technology apparently based on manipulation of quantum probability and superstrings, Kusanagi-Jones could make an educated layman’s guess at what was going on. The mysterious energy might be generated
between
universes, in a manner analogous to a thermocline. Some quality—the cosmological constant, gravity, something even more basic—varied along the cosmocline, to use Kii’s word. And that variation produced a gradient, which produced potential energy, which could be converted into
useful
energy. They could stick the far end of a wormhole into the general vicinity of a star, even, he supposed, though he wouldn’t vouch for the integrity of the star afterward. This was a species that could grab hold of a superstring and open up a wormhole to another universe as if tugging aside a drape. Kii’s promise to obliterate the Coalition stem and branch if it threatened Kii’s pets was not idle posturing.

It was just Kusanagi-Jones’s fortune that the Dragon was ethical and preferred to avoid atrocity. When convenient. And that he was constrained by the programmed equivalent of a neurochemical tether; he was physically (if that was the right word for a Transcended intelligence) incapable of acting against his species’ interests.

Leaving Kusangi-Jones the choice of siding with Vincent, and leaving most of his species under the threat of Assessment and the Cabinet’s less-than-generous governance—or of lying to Vincent, and protecting New Amazonia from the Coalition and the Coalition from the Dragons, and losing Vincent for good. He could always
tell
Vincent. But the questions would inevitably lead to New Earth, and the death of the
Skidbladnir
.

Not that it mattered. The choice wasn’t a choice. It was just torture, and part of the pain was knowing how it would end.

“I need an Advocate,” Kusanagi-Jones muttered, as Saide Austin paused at the bottom of the steps to shake three more hands and then, adjusting her heavy rings, her robes swaying around her sandal-corded ankles, ascended majestically.

“After lunch,” Vincent answered, with a curious glance.

Kusanagi-Jones nodded. The stage had the same curious resilience as the pavement; it felt almost buoyant under his boots as he retraced his steps and reached out to assist Elder Austin up the last stair. Her hands matched her girth and her shoulders, wide fingered and strong. Her rings pinched him as he hauled her up, and when he pulled back his hand there was a line of blood in the crease of his finger. She stepped closer, concerned, when he raised the hand to examine. “Did I hurt you?”

“Nothing serious,” he said. His docs were already sealing the wound and a reflexive check for contaminants showed nothing; his watch lights blinked green and serene under the skin. One thing about intelligence work in the diplomatic corps: they paid for the best. “It won’t bother me long.” And as she smiled, chagrined, and turned aside to take Vincent’s hand, he reached out to greet Elder Kyoto. This time he waited until she reached the top of the stair.

Like the hoary joke about the flat-Earther arguing with the geologist, it was speeches, speeches, speeches all the way down. Vincent had spent three months on
Kaiwo Maru,
which Michelangelo slept away in cryo, studying the sparse information they had on New Amazonia—fragments sourced from long-term agents on the ground, like Michelangelo’s contact, Miss Ougadougou—and reinforcing chipped and hypnagogic language lessons with live study, for which there was no effective replacement. New Amazonia’s patois was as unique as Ur’s. And Vincent didn’t have the easy, playful facility with languages that Angelo went to such lengths to conceal.

But it had given him an opportunity to work on his own speech. On a Coalition world, he’d have been confident that most people would hear nothing but a few carefully selected sound bites, if the adaptive algorithms in their watches let that much get through the filters. An infotainment system that could determine when the user was bored or not paying attention—and later, efficiently filter out similarly boring content—was handy. But sometimes limiting.

New Amazonia was different. As on Ur, politics was the subject of a good deal of social and personal focus, and the repatriation ceremony would hold the planet’s eyes.

Vincent waited and listened while Claude Singapore welcomed him and Michelangelo and their precious cargo to Penthesilea. Her own speech had been surprisingly short and to the point, and when she turned to introduce him, he paused a moment to admire her grasp of rhetoric before rising and stepping out of the shade of the canopy.

He barely resisted the urge to adjust his chemistry as he stepped up to the lectern, Michelangelo at his side as faithful and silent as any politician’s wife. Sunlight pushed his shoulders down. Like the rest of the speakers, he wasn’t wearing a hat, and the heat seeping through his wardrobe scorched and prickled burned shoulders. He touched the pad on the lectern and said “active” to key the public address system to his voice. He lifted his eyebrows at Michelangelo; all he needed to do. Angelo knew. Vincent’s focus would be on reading and working the crowd from here on in, shaping their energy and giving it back to them, flavored with what he wanted them to think. Judgment, safety, discretion—those had just become Michelangelo’s job.

Vincent took a breath, squared his shoulders, and drew the crowd’s energy around him like a veil. Audiences were like perfume. Every one a little bit different, but with practice, you could identify the notes. He read this group as expectant, curious, unfriendly. Neither Vincent Katherinessen nor the Coalition was welcome here.

Giving Vincent a mere cable bridge to balance. Because he didn’t care to rehabilitate the Coalition in their eyes. But
Vincent
needed to retain their respect.

And he wasn’t about to address the
citizens.

“People of New Amazonia,” he began, raising his voice and pitching it so the audio motes would recognize it and amplify it across the crowd. “I stand before you today in hope—”

It was as far as he got. Michelangelo shouted
“Shooter!”
and Vincent, as he was conditioned to do, went limp.

The next sensation should have been a blow, the impact of Angelo’s body taking him down, covering him.

But it didn’t happen quite that way.

Certain things happened when Michelangelo saw the gun come up, and all of them happened fast enough that if later asked, he would have been unable to provide their sequence. He registered the weapon before it was sighted in, shouted a warning, pointed, and dove for Claude Singapore. A split-second judgment, based on the realization that the weapon was tending toward her, that Vincent’s wardrobe would afford him protection, and that Vincent had partial cover behind the lectern. Shafaqat Delhi was half a step behind him, and she landed atop Vincent, who had recovered from his surprise enough to dive with her to the floor of the stage and land facedown, arms around his head. Michelangelo lost sight of him then; he felt the shock and smelled the
snap
of ozone as something struck his wardrobe and he struck Elder Singapore.

A second gunshot cracked, louder and longer—two fired at once?—and Michelangelo’s skin jumped away from transmitted pressure as his wardrobe caught that one, too. Shouting echoed around the square: more gunfire, now. Not surprising, when most of the crowd was armed, but it seemed fairly restrained, and no more bullets were arching over the stage.

And the prime minister was shoving at his chest and cursing him as his wardrobe snapped painful sparks at her. “Stay down,” he hissed. He slapped the cutoff on his watch so it wouldn’t electrocute her, and caught her hand as she was reaching for her weapon. “Let security handle it.”

By the time he dared to lift his head and let her lift hers, they had. Elder Singapore shoved him away violently and sat. “You’ll hear about that,” she snapped.

He permitted it only because they were behind a screen of security agents, and—to be honest—he wanted to get to Vincent, who was making much less fuss about an equally rough takedown. Two bullets hung beside Kusanagi-Jones, trapped in the aura of his wardrobe like hovering bees. He dialed a glove and plucked them out of the fog.

Shafaqat already had a transparent baggie ready, and she took the bullets—pristine, despite having been stopped by the antishock features of the wardrobe fog—and made them vanish without so much as catching Kusanagi-Jones’s eye. He could get to like that woman.

“Vincent.” He crouched as Vincent pushed to his knees.

“Unharmed,” Vincent answered, despite the evidence of a scratch across his cheek and a bloody nose.

“Good work.”

Kusanagi-Jones smiled in spite of himself, standing. People in the square were shouting, shoving. Something shattered against the stage, and Vincent ducked reflexively. “All I did was yell. Local security swarmed the shooters. Let’s get you off the stage, Vincent. They’re not pleased about the security—”

“Hell, no,” Vincent answered, wincing again—this time, Kusanagi-Jones thought, from the pain of moving in his own stiff, burned skin. His hand, fever-warm, slid into Kusanagi-Jones’s, and he levered himself up.

“I have a speech to give.”

Kusanagi-Jones, watching Vincent shove ineffectually at his braids and mop blood onto his hand as something else was hurled and broke, bit his own lip hard to stop his eyes from stinging. Because now he knew what he was going to do.

15

IT WAS FORTUNATE THAT VINCENT HAD PRACTICED HIS speech until it was as automatic to his recall as his system number, because later, he couldn’t remember having recited a word of it. He knew he extemporized the introduction, and if it hadn’t been recorded he never would have known what he said. He must have made quite an impression with the blood caking his face and the split lip, clinging to the edges of the lectern like a drunk in an effort to keep the weight off his knee. His wardrobe provided a brace, but that hadn’t helped absorb the impact when he went down. At first, the crowd had been restive, muttering, rustling like a colony of insects with passed whispers. More security agents arrived while Vincent was speaking, filtering through the audience, but they didn’t reassure him as much as Michelangelo’s silent warmth at his elbow. Or the way the crowd calmed as he spoke, subsiding like whitecaps after a passing storm.

When he stepped back from the lectern, he had silence. A long moment of it, respectful, considering. And then first snapping, scattered as the first kernels of corn popping, and then stamping feet and shouts—some approval, some approbation, he thought, but nothing else shattered on the stage. He waved and nodded. Lesa was on his right side, also waving, and her left hand threaded through his arm as she tugged him back. Michelangelo was right there, too, covering Vincent with his body, as Saide Austin stepped forward.

“Like to see her match that,” Angelo murmured.

“I did okay?”

Angelo touched him carelessly. “Real good.”

“Good,” Vincent said, aware that he sounded petulant, and not caring. He was seeing stars now—literally, sparkles in front of his eyes—as the adrenaline wore off. “My nose hurts.”

“And your back?” Lesa asked.

“My back,” he said, with tight dignity, “hurts more.”

Vincent looked gray, the blood draining from his face as he sat stiffly upright on the chair, his leg stretched out before him to ease the knee. Kusanagi-Jones slipped his hand across the gap between chairs and took Vincent’s, squeezing, hiding the action with their bodies. Vincent sighed and softened a little, his shoulders falling away from his neck, though he had the sense not to lean back. Shafaqat handed Vincent a wet towel while Elder Austin was still talking. He took it right-handed, and didn’t release Kusanagi-Jones’s hand with his left while he dabbed at the crusted blood on his lip. “At least my nose isn’t broken.”

Kusanagi-Jones widened his eyes and spoke in an undertone. “It’s supposed to look like that?”

“The Christ, don’t make me laugh.” He winced, and then flinched, as if the act of wincing hurt. Vincent handed the bloody cloth back to Shafaqat and glanced at his watch, and Kusanagi-Jones knew he was thinking about upping his chemistry and dismissing the idea. He was still idly checking readouts when Austin’s speech came to an end, a study in deceptive inattention, but when he glanced up, his eyes were sparkling. They stood when everybody else did, herded by security agents, and filed down the steps and through the crowd again. Kusanagi-Jones covered Vincent as much as possible, varying distance and pace within the crowd, and for the first time was actively angry that all of the New Amazonian security was female and that Vincent was taller than any of them and all the New Amazonian dignitaries. And, of course, taller than Kusanagi-Jones. There was nothing to block a head shot, if there was another shooter somewhere in the crowd.