Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  “These galleries?” Vincent said. “This is where the Coalition troops…”

  “Were killed, yes.” Thissubject, Miss Pretoria seemed to understand might be touchy. “The ones who came to repatriate the art. And New Amazonia. Seven hundred. Give or take.”

  “A ship’s complement of marines.”

  “We warned them to withdraw. They attempted to disarm us.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones glanced over in time to catch that predatory flash of her teeth once more. Vincent was watching her, his hands still in his pockets, his face calm.

  “There’s been a lot of practical experiment on what happens after the occupiers disarm the locals. Just because we’ve disavowed Old Earth history doesn’t mean we fail to study it. You can file that one with sense of humor,if you like.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones felt the thrum between them, Vincent and Pretoria. Her chin was up, defiant. Vincent stood there, breathing, smiling, for her to bash herself against. For a moment, Kusanagi‑Jones pitied her; she didn’t stand a chance. Vincent’s silences were even more devastating than his sarcasm.

  He ended this one with a soft, beckoning gesture, something that invited Miss Pretoria into the circle of his confidences. “I don’t suppose you’d consent to tell me how you managed to herd or lure an entire ship’s complement into these chambers, Miss Pretoria? Just as a goodwill gesture, something to get negotiations off on a congenial foot?”

  She tilted her head. “You never know when we might need it again. And speaking of goodwill gestures, do you have a list of the art treasures you’re returning?”

  “One wasn’t sent ahead?”

  “One was,” she answered. She started walking again. Vincent accompanied her and Kusanagi‑Jones fell in closer to the security detail. “But since we’ve planned that repatriation ceremony for tomorrow, it doesn’t hurt to make sure we’re all working from the same assumptions.”

  Her tone made it plain she knew they weren’t, but was willing to play the game. Kusanagi‑Jones found himself admiring her a little. More than a little; she had sangfroid, an old‑fashioned haggler’s nerve. Maybe she’d known exactly what she was doing with that too‑sharp word robbers.

  Her next comment clinched it. “If you’ll follow me,” she said, “I’ll show you some things that weren’tstolen.”

  Vincent, surprising everyone except Kusanagi‑Jones, laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a week. Kusanagi‑Jones laughed, too. But he was laughing at the startled expression on Pretoria’s face. “About that sense of humor–”

  She grinned, and he remembered the sharpness with which she’d returned the volley after overhearing the unflattering nickname. “You’re not going to tell me men have one, too?”

  Vincent shot him a look; Kusanagi‑Jones answered with a shrug. They passed through three chambers, each one with soft full‑spectrum light and stairs ascending to a gallery, each with white walls bare and smooth as the walls of a chalk cave.

  “How much did they take?” Vincent asked. Even hushed, his voice echoed into many‑layered resonance. “All this?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I know what we brought. The lists I transferred.”

  She smiled. “That’s maybe a twentieth of it–”

  “The Christ.”

  “Mmm. These vaults were on the surface then, public galleries. A museum. We brought what we could from Old Earth–”

  “Women’s art,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, but he was thinking On the surface? All this?

  She stopped and turned, her shoulders square and her chin lifted. She folded her hands behind her back. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “I wondered why your ancestors limited the collection.”

  She gave him that smile again, the toothy one. “Somebody else was taking care of the rest.”

  “You’re content with the bias?”

  She turned and kept walking. Another half of one of the big rooms in silence, until she paused beside a wall like any other. She lifted her hand and pressed the palm against the surface. “Are you content with yours?”

  Before he could answer, the wall scrolled open and a door created itself where there hadn’t been a door a moment before. She stepped through before the edges had finished collapsing seamlessly into themselves, and Kusanagi‑Jones had an awful moment of clarity. It came to him, lead‑crystal sharp, that he needed to be thinking of this city not as static structures, but as the biggest damned fog this side of a starship. But Vincent didn’t look worried, so Kusanagi‑Jones made sure he didn’t look worried either and followed Pretoria through the gap. He stopped so fast that Vincent ran into him.

  The contents of this room were intact. It was a hundred meters long, with three galleried levels of well‑hung walls, plinths and stands scattered about the floor. He had taken three steps forward, sliding out from under Vincent’s steadying hand on his shoulder, before he even thought to turn and ask their warden for permission. Still smiling, she waved him forward. Vincent dogged him, and he couldn’t even be bothered to be offended when Pretoria called after him, “Don’t touch!” although he did growl something about being housebroken, under his breath.

  He folded his hands ostentatiously in the small of his back, and tried to remember not to hold his breath. There were pieces here Michelangelo couldn’t even name, although he had–many years since–taken a class in the treasures that had been lost during Diaspora, and he’d chipped all the relevant records before he left Earth.

  Vincent leaned over his shoulder, breath warm on his ear, resting a hand on his shoulder where the skin of his fingers could brush Michelangelo’s neck. It was scarcely a distraction. He paused in front of a case with a long, chain‑linked silver necklace, as much sculpture as it was jewelry, hung on a display rack like a barren branch. His chip told him the name.

  “Matthesen,” he said, pointing with his chin so as not to give Pretoria an excuse to shoot him. “ Fear Death by Water. Supposed to be lost.” He knew the white marble miniature of a nude and pensive woman beside it without help. “Vinnie Ream Hoxie’s The Spirit of the Carnival. These must all be North American. That’s Jana Sterbak’s The Dress–”

  Vincent didn’t even comment on the power required to keep the lights that shimmered words in archaic English burning across the wirework form. “That’s art?”

  “Heathen,” Michelangelo said, more fondly than he intended. “Yes, it’s art. And oh…”

  It caught his eye from across the room, a swirl of colors that seemed at first an amorphous form on a starry field, a nebula in dank earthen green and mahogany. A heavy tentacled brown arm reached from the upper left‑hand corner of the canvas, shoving at the sky like an oppressive hand. Michelangelo gasped with the power of it, the vault, the weight, the mass. Just paint on canvas, and after he practically ran across the room to it, it shoved him back a step.

  Vincent, who had followed him, swallowed but didn’t speak.

  “The Lawrence Tree,”Michelangelo said. He didn’t need to look at the plaque. “Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “I’ve heard of her,” Vincent said. He almost sounded surprised. “What’s this one?”

  Michelangelo didn’t know. He waved a question at Pretoria.

  The warden came to them, as if reluctant to shout now that they were thick in the spell of the gallery. “Saide Austin is the artist,” she said, and Michelangelo took a moment to appreciate the irony of a woman named after a city named after a man. “It’s called Jinga Mbande.”

  It was wood, Michelangelo thought, darkly polished, the image of a well‑armed woman with upthrust breasts pointed like weapons, the strong curve of her belly hinting at fecundity. She held a primitive firearm in one hand, a spear in the other, and had the sort of classically African features that were rarely even seen on Earth anymore. “An Amazon heroine?”

  “A freedom fighter,” Pretoria said. She stood silent on his left hand as Vincent waited on his right, and they all breathed in the silence of the rich gle
am of light on polished wood. The air was cool and smelled faintly of lemon oil.

  “Old Earth history,” she said then, and stepped away as if she needed to cut the camaraderie that had almost grown between them. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the friezes.”

  They went. Up a spiral stair– neck‑breaking‑type,Vincent mouthed at him as they climbed–to the third and final gallery. As they reached the landing, Miss Pretoria about a dozen steps ahead of them, Kusanagi‑Jones leaned forward and whispered in Vincent’s ear, “If this is where the marines were killed, was Montevideo’s comment a veiled threat?”

  Vincent coughed. “Pretty well‑cursed veiled.” And then he looked up and fell silent.

  Kusanagi‑Jones hadn’t been prepared to be struck dumb again. You’d think you’d run out of awe eventually.And perhaps one would. But not right away.

  The friezes, as Montevideo had so blithely called them, were a single long strip about three meters tall that ran the entire perimeter of the room. They had subtle detail and deep refractive color that washed to white when you weren’t looking at them directly, so they faded out as one glanced along their length, ghosts emerging and vanishing. At first he wasn’t sure if the images actually moved, but he occasionally stopped and stared at one detail or another, and became aware that the scene shifted, playing itself out in slow animation.

  And he understood why the New Amazonians called the long‑lost native aliens Dragons.

  The pictured creatures were feathered almost‑serpents, four‑limbed counting the wings and the legs that helped anchor the flight membranes. The wings were bony and double‑jointed, shaped for walking on and manipulating things as well as flight. The vane was stretched skin over an elongated pinkie finger that formed the longest part of the leading edge of the wing, five more fingers making a grasping appendage at the front of the joint. They were neither bat‑wings nor bird‑wings, despite the hairy feathers–or feathery fur–that covered the creatures’ backs and napes and heads.

  The Dragons flocked through the spires of what must be one of the other cities of New Amazonia, because it was far taller and more towered than Penthesilea, and they raced clouds in jewel‑bright colors. The ones in the foreground were as detailed as Audubon paintings. The ones in the background were movement itself. In among them were wingless animals, four legged, like lean reptilian jackals. They reminded Michelangelo of some kind of feathered dinosaur, what a theropod would look like if it ran on all fours.

  A scientist–an anthropologist or biologist–might have cautioned him against jumping to conclusions. But to Michelangelo, it was breathtakingly obvious that the winged animals were the city builders, the native inhabitants. Even if several of them did not hold objects in their hands that he tentatively identified as a light‑pen, a paintbrush, a chisel, the eyes would have given them away. They were all iris, shot through with threads of gold or green–but even in the thing the New Amazonians inadequately called a frieze,they were aware.

  The Dragons towered three or four feet taller than he, even with their long necks ducked to fit into the frieze. They moved in the animation, the three humans the focus of their predatory attention. Michelangelo felt them watching, and it took the gallery railing across his lower back to make him realize that he had backed the entire width of the catwalk away.

  6

  AFTER THEY RETURNED TO THEIR ROOMS, MICHELANGELO took his time finishing his report to Kaiwo Maruand getting ready for bed. Vincent waited until he ordered the lights off and slid in beside him. He turned under the covers, cloth brushing his skin, and pressed himself against his partner’s back, draping an arm around Angelo’s waist. Michelangelo stiffened in the darkness.

  “This is twice now,” Vincent said. “Are you going to tell me why you’re angry?” Again in their own private language, needlessly complicated, half implied and half tight‑beamed, the parts of speech haphazardly switched and vocabulary and syntax swiped from every language either one of them had encountered.

  For a moment, he thought Michelangelo wouldn’t answer. But his hand covered Vincent’s, and he said, “Twice?”

  “On Kaiwo Maruand at dinner. I can’t think what I said to anger you, but it must be something.” He kissed Angelo’s neck.

  Michelangelo didn’t respond. Not even a shiver, and this time he let the silence drag. Vincent was just about to retreat to his own side of the bed when Michelangelo stretched, turning so their eyes could meet, the transmitted light of the nebula revealing his expression. Which, as usual, admitted nothing.

  “If we’re going to work together–” –you have to talk to me.It was more than talking, though. He wanted what they had once had, the trust and the knowledge that Michelangelo would be where he was needed. And it was unfair to ask.

  Vincentwas the one keeping secrets that could get them both killed. The betrayal had already happened, and Angelo inevitably was going to find out about it and have to live with the consequences. How many times are you going to make his choices for him?

  Whatever lies Michelangelo was implying, they were for the job; he had made that plain on Kaiwo Maru.The smallest dignity Vincent could do in return was not to lie to Michelangelo about Vincent’s honorable intentions.

  So Vincent leaned forward, instead, and kissed his partner. There was a moment of resistance as their wardrobes analyzed the situation, but as he’d suspected after Kaiwo Maru,they were still keyed to each other. Vincent had never changed his program, and apparently Michelangelo hadn’t either. The resistance faded, and Angelo took Vincent into his arms.

  Sounds drifted into the room from outside, attenuated by height. Music, laughter. A woman singing, the nauseating reek of scorched flesh from some restaurant, people getting the jump on Carnival. The colored sky shone through the false skylights, filling the room with a faint glow. Michelangelo’s mouth opened. He kissed hard, well, fluently, his hands soft and warm on Vincent’s back. And Vincent…wished he believed.

  Lesa undressed herself and hung her clothes up to air without bothering House to raise the lights. The night was cloudless and there was enough illumination through the ceiling that she had no problem maneuvering in her own bedroom. But it was dark enough that she was surprised to find the bed already occupied when she tugged the covers back.

  Surprised, but not terribly so. “Hello, Robert.”

  He was awake. He propped himself on his elbows, the sheets gliding down his chest, revealing curly hair. Glossy scars contrasted with the oiled smoothness of his scalp. His teeth flashed in the darkness. “I thought you’d be longer.”

  She shrugged, and slid into bed beside him, rolling onto her stomach, voice muffled in the pillow. “Let me guess. I forgot to tell Agnes that I wanted you tonight?”

  “She said to check in with her in the morning, because she thought you’d be late, too, and didn’t feel like waiting up. Arms down by your sides, please?”

  His hands were strong; he slicked them down with the oil from the bedstand while she shrugged her nightshirt off, and started work on her shoulders first. Maybe not safe to give him so much autonomy, so much freedom. Maybe not wise to be as permissive with him as she was. But this was Robert, after all, and he was as much hers as he could be without a transfer and a marriage, and she trusted him more than any woman she knew.

  She didn’t doubt his temper, or his capacity for violence. They were marked on his body, and his status as males figured such things was significant. But he’d never directed either of those things at her, or any woman.

  Not gentle, no. But smart.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Her spine cracked under his weight. “Mmph.” It might have stood a better chance of being a word if she hadn’t had a mouthful of pillow. Robert pulled the cushion out of the way, straightening her neck, and ran his thumbs down her spine, triggering a dizzying release of endorphins. “You heard something? Or is this a social call?”

  “Would that it were, my lady.”

  She laughed at his pretend formalit
y. “It can be a social call, too.”

  “Business first.” But the kiss he planted between her shoulder blades promised pleasant business, at least. He stayed bent down, nuzzling through her hair to brush his lips across her ear. “Did you meet the Colonials?”

  “Yes. And yes, it’s them. Well, I’m as sure as I can be.”

  “And what do you think? Can we trust Katherinessen?”

  His hands forestalled her shrug. Flinty, dangerous hands, the gnarled scar across the palm of the left one rough when it caught on her skin. “Do we have another choice? I can’t tell, Robert. I don’t know. Claude won’t risk it. There’s no guarantee about Katherinessen. Kusanagi‑Jones is hard‑line Old Earth, though I don’t understand it and it makes me sick to think about, and Claude’s bound to think placating the Coalition is safer than open opposition, especially if it means allying ourselves with Coalition worlds in open revolt.”

  “Appeasement has such a glorious history.”

  “This isn’t about glory. And it worked for Ur. Sort of.”

  “Which is why they’re so eager to be rid of the Governors now?”

  His tone was arch and dry. She matched it. “Keep it in your pants, Robert.”

  “I’m not wearing any pants,” he said reasonably.

  Somewhere, she found the energy to snort. “Anyway, if Mother finds out I’ve been letting you read history, she’ll–”

  “Have your hide for a holster. I know.” His caresses became more personal and she rolled over, looking up through the dark. He touched the tip of her nose. “What are you going to do?”

  She shrugged, and sighed. “I’ll know tomorrow. If we miss the meeting, it’s not like we’ll get another chance–”

  “No.” He kissed her. “Not in time for Julian, anyway.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out. So it was with a certain amount of amusement that he identified the emotion he was feeling over telling the truth–as guilt. Well, a limited sort of truth, with the limitations carefully obscured, but still. Unmistakably the truth.