Carnival-SA (7 page)

Lesa didn’t believe her mother’s confident prediction that the Governors would protect them. For one thing, as long as they remained an ungoverned world, they weren’t under the OECC’s ecological hegemony. The Governors might easily decide it was better to shoot first and reconstruct later, and they might be willing to destroy the Dragons’ legacy to do it.

She dressed and found her evening holster on the hanger. It was supple red leather, detailed in gold, and it stood out against the sea-snake sequins of her flowing trousers.

Kusanagi-Jones was finishing his push-ups when she turned back to the image in her blotter. He came up on his knees and rose with casual power, standing in time to hook Katherinessen around the waist as Katherinessen went by, and pulled him close.

Lesa flicked the desk off and reached for her honor in the same gesture. Bonding the pistol into her holster, she frowned.

All right, they were cute. But she couldn’t afford to start thinking of them as human.

Angelo’s body was warm and firm through his gi. His hair tickled Vincent’s cheek and the crook of his neck smelled of clean sweat, quickly fading into the same toiletry licenses he’d been using for the last thirty years. Vincent wondered what he’d do if they ever took that particular cedar note off the market. It was a
known
smell, viscerally, and Vincent’s body responded. “Go get clean. It’s pleasant. Decadent. You’ll like it.”

Michelangelo stepped back, his gi vanishing into curls of foglets. His body was still hard under it, blocky, the pattern of moles and tight-spiraled curls on his chest at once familiar and alien, like coming home to a place where you used to live.

“Figures. We have to come to the last outposts of civilization for our decadence.” Tendons flexed as he glanced at his watch. “Be out in a few ticks. I’ve given you access to my licenses. Figure out what I should wear, won’t you?”

Vincent smiled to hide the twisting sensation. Dressing Angelo had always been Vincent’s job. Left to his own devices, Michelangelo would probably walk around naked most of the time. Not that most people would object—

Mind on your job,
Vincent reprimanded himself, and set about trying to figure out what the New Amazonians would consider “formal.”

Uncertain what cultural conditions would apply, their offices had issued each of them a full suite of licenses, which, of course, did not include any hats. Formal fashions on Old Earth tended to be more elaborate than those on colonial planets, which cleared about half the database, but Michelangelo had the advantage of his complexion and looked wonderful in colors that Vincent couldn’t remotely carry off. Vincent chose a wrap jacket and trousers in rusty oranges and reds, simple lines to offset the pattern, the shoulders flashing with antique-looking mirrors and bouillon embroidery. That should dazzle a few eyes—and hearts, if Vincent was reading Miss Pretoria’s admiring glances accurately. He had absolutely no objections to using his partner’s brooding charisma as a weapon.

For himself, he chose a winter-white dinner jacket and trousers instead of tights, because he didn’t want to risk slippery feet if they were expected to go barefoot again. The jacket was plain, almost severe, with understated shaded green patterning on the lapels.

He’d wear a shirt and cravat to dress it up. Let them stare at Michelangelo’s chest; it was prettier than Vincent’s, anyway.

He was already dressed, toiletries arranging his hair and moisturizing his face, when Michelangelo emerged from the fresher. He flicked his watch, sending Michelangelo the appropriate license key. Michelangelo’s wardrobe assembled the suit in moments; he glanced at himself in the mirrored wall and nodded slightly, as if forced, unwilling to admit that Vincent had made him handsome. “I look like a Hindu bride,” he said, fiddling with his cuffs.

“I don’t think we have a license for bangles,” Vincent answered. “If we’d known how conspicuously the New Amazonians consume, I would have requisitioned some.”

Michelangelo’s disapproval creased the corners of his eyes. When he spoke, it was in their own private code, the half-intelligible pidgin of one of Ur’s most backwater dialects and a random smattering of other languages that they’d developed in training and elaborated in years since. It had started as a joke, Vincent teaching Michelangelo to speak one of his languages, and Michelangelo elaborating with ridiculous constructions in Greek, Swahili, Hindi, and fifteen others. It was half-verbal and half-carrier, tightbeamed between their watches—practiced until, half the time, all they had needed was a glance and a hand gesture and a fragment of a sentence.

It had saved their lives more than once.

“A planet like this,” Michelangelo said, “and they’re wearing nonrenewables and doing who-knows-what to the ecosystem. Haven’t seen forests like that—”

—outside of old 2-D movies and documentaries about pre-Change, pre-Diaspora Old Earth. Vincent knew, and sympathized. The frustration in Michelangelo’s voice couldn’t quite cover the awe. Ur didn’t have forests like that, and neither did Le Pré, Arcadia, or Cristalia. Never mind New Earth, which was about as dissimilar to Old Earth as it could be, without being a gas giant.

“See the logging scars when we came in?” Michelangelo continued. “Bet you balcony passes to the Sydney Bolshoi that those outgoing lighters are exporting
wood
.”

“Not to Old Earth. Not legally.”

They’d dealt with their fair share of environmental criminals in the past, though. And it wasn’t even necessarily illegal trade; there were other colonies, not under OECC oversight—and there are idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality.

Michelangelo knew it, too, and knew his denial was reflexive. “So smuggling happens. More to the point, what do you expect from a bunch of women? Short-term thinking; profit now, deal with the consequences later.”

Vincent shrugged. “They can be educated. Assisted.”

“Perhaps. You saw her shoes, right?”

Vincent nodded. “Pretoria’s? I didn’t recognize the fiber. What about them?”

“
Leather,
Vincent.” Michelangelo’s stagy shudder ran a scintilla of light across the mirrors on the yoke of his jacket. “I’m trying very hard not to think about dinner.”

4

FOR THE THIRTIETH TIME, KUSANAGI-JONES WISHED THEIR downloads on New

Amazonian customs had been more in depth. Although, given this was the first
physical
contact between the New Amazonians and a Coalition representative since the Six-Weeks-War almost twenty years ago, he was lucky to get anything.

He’d guessed right about the food, and he hadn’t even had to wait until dinner to prove it. There were crudités—familiar vegetables in unusual cultivars, and some unfamiliar ones that must be local produce amenable to human biochemistry. But he didn’t trust anything else, even if he’d been rude enough to wardrobe up an instrument and stick it in a sample.

Usually mission nerves killed his appetite and he struggled with the diplomatic requirements of eating what was set before him. As the gods of Civil Service would have it, though, when the options included things he was unwilling to consume even in the name of détente, he was practically dizzy with hunger. And the wine the New Amazonians served at the reception was potent. So he crunched finger-length slices of some sweet root or stem that reminded him of burgundy-colored jicama and stuck at Vincent’s elbow like a trophy wife, keeping a weather eye on the crowd.

Penthesilea was the planetary capital, and there were dignitaries from Medea, Aminatu, Hippolyta, and Lakshmi Bai in attendance, in addition to the entire New Amazonian Parliament, the prime minister, and the person whom Kusanagi-Jones understood to be her wife. There was also a security presence, though he was not entirely certain of its utility in the company of so many armed and obviously capable women. Even that assembly—at least three hundred individuals, perhaps 95 percent female—didn’t suffice to make the ballroom seem crowded. They moved barefoot over the cool living carpets, dancing and laughing and conversing in whispers, with ducked heads, while the musicians sawed gamely away on a raised and recessed stage, and handsome men in sharp white coats bore trays laden with what Kusanagi-Jones could only assume were delicacies to the guests. It could have been an embassy party on any of a dozen planets, if he crossed his eyes.

But that wasn’t what provoked Kusanagi-Jones’s awe. What kept distracting him every time he lifted his eyes from his plate, or the conversation taking place between Vincent and Prime Minister Claude Singapore—while Singapore’s wife and Miss Pretoria hovered like attendant crows—was the way the walls faded from warm browns and golds through tortoiseshell translucence before vanishing overhead to reveal a crescent moon and the bannered light of the nebula called the Gorgon. The nebula rotated slowly enough that the motion was unnerving, but not precisely apparent.

When the silver-haired prime minister was distracted by a murmured comment or question from an aide, Kusanagi-Jones tapped Vincent on the arm, offered him the plate, and—when Vincent ducked to examine what was on offer—whispered in his partner’s ear, “Suppose they often feel like specimens on a slide?”

“I suppose you adapt,” Vincent answered. He selected a curved flake of something greenish and crispy, and held it up to inspect it. Light radiated from the walls—a flattering, ambient glow that did not distract from the view overhead.

“Are you admiring our starscape, Miss Kusanagi-Jones?”

He glanced at the prime minister, hiding his blink of guilt, but it wasn’t Singapore who had spoken. Rather, her wife, Maiju Montevideo.

“Spectacular. Do I understand correctly that Penthesilea is entirely remnant architecture?”

Montevideo was a Rubenesque woman of medium stature. Regardless of his earlier comment regarding Hindu brides, Kusanagi-Jones was minded to compare her to the goddess Shakti grown grandmotherly. Her eyes narrowed with her smile as she gestured to the domed, three-lobed chamber. “All this,” she said. She led with her wrist; Kusanagi-Jones wondered if New Amazonia had the sort of expensive girls’

schools where they trained apparently helpless young women to draw blood with their deportment. These women would probably consider that beneath them, but they certainly had mastered the skills. Her eyes widened; he tried to decide if it was calculated or not. From the shift of Vincent’s weight, he thought so. “Miss Pretoria hasn’t taken you to see the frieze yet?”

“There hasn’t been time.” Miss Pretoria slid between them, a warning in the furrow between her eyes.
Interesting
.

“No,” Vincent said. Vincent didn’t look up, apparently distracted by the vegetables, but he wouldn’t have missed anything Kusanagi-Jones caught. His nimble fingers turned and discarded one or two more slices before he abandoned the plate untasted on a side table.

Elder Montevideo showed her teeth. Kusanagi-Jones couldn’t fault New Amazonian dentistry. Or perhaps it was the apparent lack of sweets in the local diet.

“After dinner?” she asked, a little too gently.

Kusanagi-Jones could still feel it happen. Vincent’s chin came up and his spine elongated. It wasn’t enough motion to have served as a tell to a poker player, but Kusanagi-Jones noticed. His own tension eased.

Vincent had just
clicked
. He was on the job and he’d found his angle. Everything was going to be just fine.

Vincent tasted his lips. “Perhaps
instead of
dinner?” he said lightly, a quip, beautiful hands balled in his pockets.

“The food isn’t to your liking, Miss Katherinessen?”

Vincent’s shrug answered her, and also fielded Kusanagi-Jones’s sideways glance without ever breaking contact with Singapore. “We don’t eat animals,” he said negligently. “We consider murder barbaric, whether it’s for food or not.”

Perfect. Calm, disgusted, a little bored. A teacher’s disapproval, as if what he said should be evident to a backward child. He might as well have said,
We don’t play in shit
. Michelangelo’s chest was so tight he thought his control might crack and leave him gasping for breath.

“Strange,” Montevideo said. The prime minister—Singapore—towered over her, but Elder Montevideo dominated their corner. “I hear some on Coalition worlds will pay handsomely for meat.”

“Are you suggesting you support illegal trade with Coalition worlds?” Vincent’s smile was a thing of legend. Hackles up, Montevideo took a half-step forward, and he was only using a quarter of his usual wattage. “There’s a child sex trade, too. I don’t suppose you condone that.”

Montevideo’s mouth was half open to answer before she realized she’d been slapped. “That’s the opinion of somebody whose government encourages fetal murder and contract slavery?”

“It is,” Vincent said. He pulled his hand from his pocket and studied the nails. Montevideo didn’t drop her gaze.

Kusanagi-Jones steadied his own breathing and stretched each sense. Every half-alert ear in the room was pricked, every courtier, lobbyist, and spy breath-held. Elder Montevideo’s hand was not the only one resting on a weapon, but it was hers that Kusanagi-Jones assessed. Eleven-millimeter caseless, he thought, with a long barrel for accuracy. Better to take Vincent down, if it came to it, risk the bullet on his own wardrobe and trust that the worried, level look Miss Pretoria was giving him meant she’d back his play if the guns came out.

He wondered about the New Amazonian rules of honor and if it mattered that Vincent was male and that he didn’t
seem
armed.

And then Vincent looked up, as if his distraction had been a casual thing, and gave her a few more watts. He murmured, almost wistfully, “Now that we’ve established that we think each other monsters, do you suppose we can get back to business?”

She blinked first, but Kusanagi-Jones didn’t let himself stop counting breaths until Claude Singapore nudged her, and started to laugh. “He almost got you,” Singapore said, and Montevideo tipped her head, acknowledging the touch.

Just a couple of fairies
. He gritted his teeth into an answering smile. Apparently, it would have been thought a victory for Vincent if he provoked the woman enough to make her draw. A Pyrrhic victory, for most men in their shoes—