Carnival-SA (40 page)

“Fledged,” it said, with no weight of emotion on the word.

If Kii were human, Vincent would have scrupled to press. He would have known he was millimeters from a moral pit trap, a bit of doublethink that would expose a violent defensive reaction when triggered. But the Dragons had Consent. They were as physically incapable of experiencing moral qualms about following orders as Vincent’s own hand was of rebelling when his consciousness instructed it to pull a trigger.

He said, “They’re not a separate species, are they?”

And Kii shifted, its wings furled tight against its sides, and blinked slowly. “The khir? They are not.”

“They’re young Dragons. Neotenous. With their growth and intellectual development intentionally retarded.”

“They are not
esthelich
. They have no Consent. We provided for them, and they protect us.”

“That’s horrible,” Lesa said. She dropped the bedcovers and climbed to her feet, wincing as her bandages touched the carpetplant. “You…engineered your own children into
slaves
?”

“Pets…no, domestic animals are not slaves,” Kii insisted. “They are without aesthetic. They are not people. Your infant creatures are immoral—no.
Sociopathic
. They are not
people
.”

Vincent reached behind Angelo to put a hand on Lesa’s arm, steadying. She shook it off. “But they could have been.”

“Not these, no. They were conceived to this purpose, and they breed true. They are animals, and would never have been born, otherwise.”

“Unless you remove the, what, the chemical inhibition? And then they transform into adults. Only with the minds of Transcended Dragons downloaded into their skulls, rather than whatever they might have become?”

“It is,” Kii said, “the Consent.”

Lesa might have wanted nothing to do with Vincent, but Michelangelo stepped closer, shoulder to shoulder, and Vincent leaned on his warmth, their wardrobes melding. “What if we lobotomized girl babies,” Angelo said. “Kept them as cattle. Destroyed their higher functions—”

“They would not be
esthelich,
” Kii said. “They would be as domestic animals, as the khir. But it would be immoral to destroy the potential to be people in one born with it.”

“But the Consent finds no ethical failing in creating the khir?”

“The Consent finds no ethical failing in the selective breeding of domestic animals.”

“Lesa,” Angelo said, “please sit down. It hurts to watch you.”

She stared at him, head drawing back as her neck stiffened, and then she nodded and sank down on the unmade bed. “I have another question for the Consent,” Vincent said.

Kii lifted its chin, ear-feathers forward to cup sound. Alert and listening.

“If you can reprogram Michelangelo’s docs, can you rewrite other code?”

“We can.”

“The Governors,” Vincent said.

And with a careful, human gesture, Kii shook its head. “It is discussed. The Consent is that it is unwise. And also that the Governors are not
esthelich,
but that they are art. And not to be destroyed.”

“Fuck,” Michelangelo said, and Vincent didn’t blame him. “Then it’s a war.”

24

THE MALES LEFT SHORTLY AFTER THE DRAGON DID, LEAVING Lesa alone in her bedroom with the sleeping khir. Michelangelo wouldn’t let her rise to see them to the door, his stern glower as effective as a seat belt, but hiding a striking chivalry that Lesa wouldn’t pretend not to chafe at and couldn’t understand how she’d earned. It still carried a taint of chauvinism, but Michelangelo seemed to think it indicated respect.

It didn’t matter. He was trying to learn, to accommodate. And she’d have fought for him even if he wasn’t. Her own honor was at stake now.

When the door spiraled closed behind Vincent and Michelangelo—and stayed closed; Lesa was wise to that trick—she pried herself off the bed again and settled wearily on the carpetplant beside it. The pain was bad enough, though analgesics and anti-inflammatories were some use—but the vertigo was truly incapacitating.

She could live with pain.

Her citizenship piece was still missing. Lost to her forever, probably, along with her daughter and her mate. But she had more than one weapon and it wasn’t as if she could go about unarmed. There was a pistol and an old holster in the bottom of the nightstand.

Lesa pulled the box out, inspected the weapon—clean and smelling muskily of gun oil—and strapped the soft, worn leather of the gunbelt around her waist. Then she loaded the honor, safetied it, and laid it on the bed. It took the same caseless ammunition as her citizenship piece. Standing was unpleasant. But she couldn’t settle the holster properly while hunched on the floor, and whatever bravado she’d issued to the males about not needing to be able to walk to shoot, she had to be able to stand to duel.

She slipped her new honor into the holster, checked twice to make sure it was locked and no round was chambered, and pulled one of the crutches away from the wall to brace herself on.

“House,” she said, “I need a mirror.”

The long interior wall with no doorways was her usual mirror. It misted gray and glazed reflective as Lesa limped toward it, transferring as much weight to the crutch as possible to keep it off her feet. She paused two meters from the wall and stared at her reflection in true color.

She looked like ragged death. Her face was puffy around the scratches and shiny with antibiotic ointment. Her hands were red-fleshed and torn, her forearms more scab than skin. She wobbled, and leaned against the crutch hard enough that her whole body canted left. The fingers of her right hand, hovering over the butt of her honor, looked like undercooked sausages, and the gouges on her palm had cracked open again and were leaking pinkish fluid.

“I am,” she whispered, “so fucked.”

The draw was reflex, wired into nerve and muscle by decades of practice. She shouldn’t have to think about it. She should barely be conscious of feeling it happen.

The air dragged at her wrist, thickened around stiff fingers. The hand was slow, the fingers inflexible; they didn’t hook the butt of the honor and glide inside the trigger guard as they should. The weight was wrong, the balance off—

Her honor skipped from her hand, spinning, and hit with a thud butt-first on the carpetplant, tottering a moment before toppling onto its side. The crutch skipped, and Lesa hit a split second later, down on one knee, her right hand slamming the floor with all her weight behind it. The pain was asphyxiating. She fought for breath—diaphragm spasming, the gasp more like a whine if she was being honest—and blinked until her vision cleared. And then she picked up her honor, holstered it, found the crutch left-handed, and forced herself up, to face the mirror again. The twenty-fifth attempt was no more successful than the third.

Pain couldn’t force her to stop, but eventually the bleeding and nausea did. She holstered her honor one last time, resettled the crutch under her armpit, and hobbled to the balcony. Julian was still down there with the other boys, running and laughing. The echoes of his voice carried to her room before she stepped outside, and she found a smile for that. The only thing he loved better than handball was his numbers.

Lesa hitched to a stop a few steps shy of the railing. She stared down, at the running children, at the watching tutors. Her gouged hand tightened on the crutch; she barely noticed. She took two steps back, into the frame of the doorway. “House,” she said. “I need to speak to Julian. Please have Alys send him down.”

When Lesa summoned them again, even Kusanagi-Jones could tell she had not been resting. Her color was worse, her hair tangled and the knees of her trousers stained with chlorophyll. And then there was the matter of the slender dark boy curled on the seat before her terminal, pecking at the keys with concentrated precision.

“Miss Pretoria?”

She gave him that eyebrow, but stepped aside to allow him into the room, Vincent at his heels. The door clicked as it contracted shut behind them, and Kusanagi-Jones paused and glanced over his shoulder. Vincent caught him looking, of course, eyebrows quirked and the faintest hint of a smile—an expression that slid through Kusanagi-Jones’s heart like a skewer. He would have sworn he could feel the muscle contracting around penetrating metal, trying to beat and only managing to shred itself a little further. Three months, on the
Kaiwo Maru
. Three months they could have had. And he had been too much of a sodding coward to even
reach
for it.

Then Vincent’s half-smile turned into a real one, as if he knew exactly what Kusanagi-Jones was thinking, and loved him for it, or in spite of it. And Kusanagi-Jones smiled back. So it went.

Kill or be killed.

Vincent took him by the elbow and steered him into the room. “You have the look of a woman with a plan,” Vincent said, and the corners of Lesa’s eyes crinkled, an expression that made Kusanagi-Jones homesick.

“Can you shield this room?” she asked.

“Shield it from what?”

“Electromagnetic monitoring.”

Vincent glanced at Kusanagi-Jones, who looked right back, silently. “Yes,” Vincent said. He touched his watch. “The whole room?”

“It’d be more convenient. I’ve already isolated it from House.”

“Angelo?”

Kusanagi-Jones nodded, and slaved his wardrobe to Vincent’s. Between them, they had enough foglets to manage a Faraday cage, since their wardrobes—given time—could manufacture more as needed. The process took a few minutes, and Lesa said nothing further throughout, which seemed an indication for communal silence. “There,” Vincent said when it was done. “I’ve added eavesdropping countermeasures.”

Lesa didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at Kusanagi-Jones and asked, “Did you download Kii’s medical program?”

“He did,” Vincent answered.

“Do you still have it?”

Julian, who hadn’t spoken, came up beside Lesa, close enough to feel her body heat without the childish admission of actually touching her or stepping behind her. Kusanagi-Jones looked at him, not at Lesa, and held up his left arm, stripping the sleeve off the forearm to show the status lights on his watch. Only one blinked green now, the slow flicker of the nanodoc condition readout. The rest glowed red or dark amber, for critical infection.

There was more amber than there had been an hour before, and not just because Kusanagi-Jones had grabbed a nap.

“I need that,” Julian said.

Kusanagi-Jones let his arm fall, and his sleeve drop over it. “The program?”

“A copy of it.” He shuffled forward, forgetting that he had been half hiding behind his mother, and grabbed Kusanagi-Jones’s wrist to pull him toward the terminal.

Bemused, Kusanagi-Jones was about to step forward and follow, until Julian froze and turned back, gazing up at Vincent with stricken eyes.

Vincent, sod him, was waiting for it. He smiled at Julian and waved him away, Kusanagi-Jones included.
Nice to know I’ve still got his mark stamped between my eyes.
But he went, as Vincent must have known he would.

“What frequency does it use?” Julian asked, and Kusanagi-Jones told him. And then queued and transferred the archive copy of Kii’s program as soon as the protocol connected.

“What exactly are you planning?” Vincent hadn’t done more than step sideways and lean back against the wall before the door. Kusanagi-Jones knew without turning that his chin would be dropped insouciantly toward his chest, his ankles crossed.

“Julian’s been working on quantum decision trees,” Lesa said.

“Fractal,” Julian corrected, without looking up from his displays and the holographic array floating in the air before him. “Fractal decision trees.”

“Which means what, in layman’s terms?” It almost sounded as if Vincent knew what was going on. Which was fine with Kusanagi-Jones, because he certainly didn’t. He could code a little, hack a wardrobe license as well as anybody—which was to say, not very well at all—but whatever Julian was doing with confident, sweeping gestures of his hands over the holopad was beyond him.

“House has its own programming language,” Lesa said. “Julian’s been learning to code for it.”

“It uses four-dimensional matrices,” Julian said. “You would not believe how tricky.” He looked up, and seemed to realize that Kusanagi-Jones was still standing behind him, peering over his shoulder with a befuddled expression. “This is going to take
awhile,
” he said, with a child’s sublime confidence in his field of expertise. “You might as well get something to eat. I won’t have anything done before tomorrow.”

“But what,” Kusanagi-Jones said, folding his hands together to keep his fingers from tightening, “are you
doing
?”

“Kii’s a computer program, right?” Lesa said. “I mean, he’s Transcendent. He’s a machine intelligence. So theoretically you could rewrite him—”

“A virus,” Vincent said.

“A
worm,
” Julian corrected. “Or more like…like…repurposing the worm he wrote for Miss Kusanagi-Jones.”

“Call me Angelo,” Kusanagi-Jones said, unable to contemplate the specter of this infant calling him Miss anything. A week was overtime on this planet. Ten days was beyond the call of duty. Julian glanced sideways enough to grin. “Anyway, we’ve got a worm. I just have to, you know, tweak it.”

“It’s not Kii,” Kusanagi-Jones said reluctantly. It was such an arrogant, audacious plan. Exactly the sort of thing Vincent would come up with, really.

He hated to punch holes in it.

“What do you mean?” Lesa asked. She had sat back down on the bed, and Kusanagi-Jones was glad. He’d
seen
her feet, even if she was determined not to show the pain. And Vincent was looking at him, too. When he’d rather hoped that Vincent would pick up the thread and do the explaining. “It’s the Consent,” Kusanagi-Jones said. “Not a hive mind, really. But the community makes up its mind and Kii does what the Consent decides. Democracy by decree. Everybody votes, and whatever gets voted up retroactively becomes everybody’s idea. Biochemical. So when Kii says it’s not his decision, he’s not saying anything more than the truth.”

And anyway, he didn’t care how good the New Amazonians were at programming for their adopted domicile, he didn’t believe for a second that the child could actually hack a Transcendent brain. And he didn’t think any of them wanted to live with the consequences of failure. Lesa stared at him, eyebrows crawling under streaked hair, and then folded her hands over her lap.