Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  The fact that he was doing it selfishly didn’t enter into it, he told himself. The fact that Vincent was right, and what he really wanted was to punish–

  Of course, Vincent only knew that because Kusanagi‑Jones wasn’t bothering to hide it. Pretoria had probably picked up on it, too, but with luck she’d think it was jealousy, male games.

  Oh, hell.

  An omission was as good as a lie, and he had told Vincent he’d chosen the therapy. He was justifying. Justifying, because if Vincent didn’t think Kusanagi‑Jones cared for him anymore, that was one less way Vincent could hurt him. Justifying, because if he hadn’tcared, if he was doing his job, then he was a much better actor than this. Justifying because he, Kusanagi‑Jones, deserved Vincent’s loathing and anger for other reasons entirely–reasons Kusanagi‑Jones was too good a Liar for Vincent to suspect, even years later.

  Justifying, and it was the sort of thing, the sort of self‑delusion, that got you killed. He knew it.

  And so did Vincent, apparently, because Vincent pushed against his hand and looked up, leaving an arc of moisture cooling on Kusanagi‑Jones’s skin. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Or else I’m more out of practice than I thought.”

  The dry tone, brittle enough to break an edge and cut yourself on. It still worked, too; Kusanagi‑Jones laughed, an honest laugh. Startled into it, though nothing Vincent said was surprising. It was just very Vincent,and Kusanagi‑Jones had been so deep in his own bout of self‑pity that he’d forgotten.

  “Tired,” he said, not bothering to hide the fact that it was a lie.

  Warm hands stroked his thighs. “Mmm. You were the one who said you didn’t need rest; you had chemistry.”

  “Rub it in.” It could only be fraught if he let it. He was a professional. And Earthneeded what they had come for. The Coalition needed it; the Governors were ruthless in balancing population and consumption against their programmed limits. Even wind farms and geothermal caused impact. Action, reaction, as incontrovertible as thermodynamics. And–seemingly abrogating those laws–clean, limitless New Amazonian energy could change the fate of two dozen worlds.

  And Kusanagi‑Jones needed their mission to fail. Or more precisely, heneeded a win–because he wasn’tVincent Katherinessen, and he wasn’t getting any younger, and accepting therapy had kept him his job, but it hadn’t done enough to lift the cloud after their last awful failure, the mess on New Earth. Kusanagi‑Jones needed a win.

  And meanwhile, ethics and–sod it, humanity–demanded he take a fall. Just like New Earth. But a win here was the only way he could count on staying alive. The only way he might be allowed to stay with Vincent. It left him cold from throat to groin to think of losing that again.

  Vincent had always been worth paying attention to in bed. And Vincent had noticed that he still wasn’t doing so. “Angelo,” he complained, “you’re thinking.”

  “And that’s supposed to be your job?” Not quite Vincent’s dry snap, but enough. “Really want to know?”

  Vincent nodded, his depilated cheek smooth on Kusanagi‑Jones’s skin. “I’ve no right to ask.”

  Somehow, in their own private language, it was possible to talk. “You never came,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, as if his betrayal hadn’t happened. And as far as Vincent knew, it hadn’t. “I know. Unrealistic expectations. You couldn’t have come. Couldn’t have found me, and there was nowhere to run. Doesn’t help.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones felt Vincent flinch. “I failed you.”

  “Didn’t–”

  “I did,” he said, as if he needed to. “But you took the therapy.”

  “I did,” he said. Six months of biochemical and psychological treatments. Kusanagi‑Jones wouldn’t call it torture; they’d both experienced torture. Profoundly unpleasant. That was all. And he wouldn’t let his hands shake talking about it now. “They said I was a model patient. Very willing.”

  Vincent tensed, shoulder against his thigh, the long muscles of his body tightening. “If this is–”

  “Vincent,” he said, “I don’t want to lie to you.”

  That shudder might have been relief, or pain. Or the flinch of a guilty conscience. But Vincent nodded and shifted his weight, moving back, pulling his warmth away. Kusanagi‑Jones stopped him, tightening his fingers on Vincent’s head.

  “I can counterfeit anything,” he said, and waited for the realization to settle in. He knew it would, although it took longer than he expected. But he felt it take hold, felt Vincent understand what he meant, felt his grief turn to disbelief.

  “You’re amazing,” Vincent said, quiet voice vibrating with excitement, suppressed laughter, his breath both warming and cooling Michelangelo’s skin. “A therapy team. A cursed therapy team. You beat reeducation. You son of a bitch.”

  “S’what I do. Not just you who’s good at his job.”

  Vincent shook his head. “I see why you would be mad at me.”

  “It’s done.” And it was. Gone and past mending, but maybe leaving room. If Michelangelo decided Vincent was worth more than his ethics.

  Michelangelo drew one knee up and pressed his palm into the coarse, rich nap of Vincent’s braids, urging silently. And Vincent, after a thoughtful pause, acquiesced.

  Later, he slid over Michelangelo, lithe body warm as he straddled his hips, fumbling their bodies into connection before pinning Michelangelo’s hands to the bed. Fingers flexed through fingers and the sheets bunched in strangely materialways as Vincent exerted the strength that had always excited them both, and Michelangelo pushed back, spreading his arms to draw Vincent’s mouth down on his own. Vincent groaned, breath rasping, and Michelangelo slurped sweat off his neck–quickly, before his wardrobe could wick it away–and left banners of suck‑marks purpling on Vincent’s golden‑brown chest. The Gorgon’s radiance, bright as moonlight, cast diffuse shadows rather than razored ones, colors layered on Vincent’s skin like a Secunda sunset, and Vincent’s meticulous nails gouged crescents on the backs of Michelangelo’s hands.

  It was good.

  But it wasn’t what it had been. It couldn’t be; there was too much moving under the surface now, and Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t set it aside. Vincent was a professional, but he wasn’t a Liar, and he was keeping back something. Once, Kusanagi‑Jones wouldn’t have minded. Once he would have known it was orders, and Vincent would tell him when he should.

  But that had been before Kusanagi‑Jones learned just how badly he’d screw Vincent over, when it came down to orders. And not even official orders.

  No. Orders on behalf of Free Earth, in opposition to the Cabinet.

  Angel walks beside giants. The nearest is warm and smells sour, sweat and fear, but under the scent is the warmth and the familiar spices of home. Mama holds his hand to keep him close, but it isn’t needed; you couldn’t pry him from her side.

  Her palm is cold and wet, and her hand is shaking. She calls him On‑hel,like she did, a pretty nickname. She shushes him. They come into a bright room and she picks him up, swings him off his feet and holds him close. Not balanced on her hip, but pressed to her chest, as if she can hide him in the folds of her wardrobe.

  Someone says big words, words he doesn’t understand. They boom, amplified. They hurt his ears, and he hides his head in Mama’s breast. She cups a big palm against the back of his head, covering his ears, making the hurt go away. He knows not to cry out loud. He curls up tight.

  Mama argues. Her arm around him is tight. But then someone else speaks. He says they won’t take the boy,and Mama staggers, as if someone has struck her a blow, and when he looks up she’s swaying with her eyes closed. “The boy is not to blame,” the man says, the man Angel’s never seen before. “The Governors say, let the punishment fit the crime.”

  Then someone pulls Angel away from her, and she lets him go as if her arm has numbed. She turns away, her round brown face contracted. She seems caught midflinch.

  He cries her name and reaches for her, but somebody has him, big arms and a con
fused moment of struggling against strength. He kicks. He’d bite, but whoever has him is wise to that trick. He’s held tight.

  “Close your eyes, Angel,” Mama says, but he doesn’t listen. She’s not looking at him. He dreams his name the way she said it again, the fond short form nobody else has ever called him.

  Whoever’s holding him says something, some words, but he’s screaming too loud to hear them, and then Mama takes a deep breath and nods, and there’s a pause, long enough that she opens her eyes and turns as if to see why what she was anticipating has not come to pass–

  –and she falls apart.

  She makes no sound. She doesn’t show pain or even squeak; the Governors are programmed to be humane. But one moment she is whole and alive and letting out a held breath and taking in another one to speak to him, and the next she pitches forward, boneless, her central nervous system disassembled. Within moments, the thing that was Angel’s Mama is a crumbling dune in the middle of a broad white empty floor, and the man who is holding him, too late, thinks to step back and turn Angel’s face away.

  He already knows not to cry out loud. He couldn’t, anyway, because his breath won’t move.

  The adult holding him soothes him, strokes him, but hesitates when he seems to feel no emotion.

  He wasn’t too worried, the adult Kusanagi‑Jones understands. The boy was too young to understand what he’d seen, most likely. And everywhere, there are families that want children and are not permitted to have them.

  Someone will take him in.

  Angelo’s breathing awoke Vincent in the darkness. It was not slow and deep, but a staccato rhythm that Vincent had almost forgotten in the intervening years, and now remembered as if it were merely hours since the last time he lay down beside Michelangelo.

  Angelo was a lucid dreamer. He had learned the trick in self‑defense, with Vincent’s assistance, decades before. Angelo could control his dreams as easily as he controlled his emotions. Just more irony that it turned out not to help the problem.

  Because it didn’t stop the nightmares.

  Vincent had hoped, half‑consciously, they might have eased over the passing years. But judging from Angelo’s rigid form in the bed, his fists clenched against his chest, his frozen silhouette and panting as if he bit back panicked sobs–

  –they were worse.

  “Angelo,” he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia–the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain–and waking. “Angelo,”Vincent snapped, bouncing the bed in preference to the dangerous activity of shaking his partner.

  Angelo’s eyelids popped open, dark irises gleaming with reflected colors. He gasped and pushed his head back against the pillow, sucking air as if he’d been dreaming of being strangled.

  He might have been. All Vincent knew about the nightmares was that they were of things that had happened, or might have happened, and between them they had enough unpleasant memories for a year’s worth of bad dreams.

  Vincent put his hand on Angelo’s shoulder; when he breathed out again he seemed calm. “Thank you,” he said. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

  “Think nothing of it,” Vincent answered, and put his head down on the pillow again.

  Lesa sat cross‑legged on the bed, a cup of tea steaming in her hands, her breakfast untouched on the tray beside her, and watched the Coalition diplomats disentangle themselves from the sheets. She had a parser‑translator running on their coded conversation of the night before, but it hadn’t been able to identify the language. It hadtossed out some possibles, based on cognates, but its inability to provide a complete translation was frustrating. It could put together a word here, a word there–Katherinessen, laughing, calling Kusanagi‑Jones a son‑of‑a‑bitchin plain Ozglish, not even com‑pat–and she got a sense that they were talking about personal history, some old hurt or illness that was tied to the hesitations in their sex.

  Just the sort of thing you’d expect recently reunited long‑term lovers to discuss when they were safe under the covers, warm in each other’s arms. But something tugged her attention, something she couldn’t quite call an irregularity, but an…eccentricity. They were together, but strained–by history, she thought, secrets, and maybe the mission itself.

  She smiled, watching Katherinessen unwind himself from the bed and pad across the carpetplant to the window, where some delicate tool rested in the sun, dripping tiny solar panels like the black leaves of an unlikely orchid.

  Secrets. Of course, Katherinessen waskeeping secrets.

  He rested his arm on the window ledge, squinting in the sunlight, and began to fuss with the interface on his implant. Recharging its battery, she realized, after a moment. Clever–and she thought it might have a system to capture the kinetic energy of his body when he moved. Meanwhile Kusanagi‑Jones checked something on his own implant, then stood and glided toward the bathroom. She shook herself free of her urge to watch him go about his morning routine; he wasn’t as pretty as Katherinessen, but he moved like a khir, all coiled muscle and liquid strength. Instead she stood, drank off her tea–kept hot by the mug–and clicked her fingers for Walter. The khir poked its head from the basket beside the door and stretched regally, long scale‑dappled legs flexing nonretractable claws among the carpetplant. Its earfeathers flickered forward and up, trembling like the fronds of a fern, and when it shook itself, dust motes and shreds of fluff scattered into the sunlight like glitter.

  Lesa snapped her fingers again and crouched, holding out a piece of her scone. Walter trotted to her, dancing in pleasure at being offered a share of breakfast. It inspected the scone with nostrils and labial pits, then took it daintily between hooked teeth as long as Lesa’s final finger‑joint. She dusted the crumbs off the khir’s facial feathers, and it chirped, dropping more bits on the carpetplant. Standing, its nose was level with hers when she crouched.

  She bumped its forehead with her hand, petting for a moment as it leaned into her touch, then stood and walked toward the fresher. The door irised into existence; the shower created itself around her. She hurried. She had things to accomplish before the repatriation, and it wasthe first of Carnival.

  Vincent sat on the window ledge, wearing the simplest loose trousers and shirt he had licensed. He sweated under them, the rising sun warming the moist air on his back. His face and chest were cool; his body was breaking the air curtain, but it didn’t seem to disrupt the climate control.

  “Angelo,” he called, loud enough to be heard over running water, “do you get the feeling we’re being watched?”

  Michelangelo’s voice drifted over splashing. “Expect we wouldn’t be?”

  Silly question, sarcastic answer, of course. But there was something picking at the edge of his senses. Something more than the knowledge that there were video and audio motes turned on them every moment. More unsettling than the knowledge that somewhere, a technician was dissecting last night’s lovemaking via infrared and voice‑stress.

  Vincent frowned, imagining too vividly the expression on some cold‑handed woman’s face as she analyzed the catch in Michelangelo’s breath when he’d finally consented to thrust up into Vincent with that particular savagery. It was rare that Angelo allowed glimpses of the man under his armor. And Vincent worked for them, he did. He always had.

  “Such a gentleman,” he called back as the water cut off, filing the shiver at the nape of his neck under deal with it later. The Penthesileans said their city was haunted, and Vincent did not wonder why. It wasn’t just the wind or the trembling in the walls when you brushed them with your hand.

  Sound carried in these arched, airy chambers. Vincent’s first reaction was that they would be prohibitive to heat. Of course, that didn’t mean much at the equator, and they wouldcatch a breeze–but these were people so energy‑rich they let the tropical sunshine splash on their streets and skins unfiltered by solar arrays, like letting gold run molten down the gutters, uncollected.

&nbs
p; He thought of Old Earth, her Governors and her painstakingly, ruthlessly balanced ecology, and sighed. If generating power were removed from the equation, that would leave agriculture and resources as the biggest impactors, and a utility fog was a very efficient use of material. One object, transfinite functions.

  Michelangelo stepped out of the shower, making it Vincent’s turn. Their wardrobes could handle sweat and body odor, but bacterial growth and skin oil were beyond them. Besides, Vincent had an uneasy suspicion he was getting hooked on warm water flooding over his body. It was a remarkable sensation.

  He kissed Michelangelo in passing, and keyed his wardrobe off before he stepped under the shower. Michelangelo would start complaining about the clothes Vincent had chosen for him soon enough, and then, if they hurried, they could make it to the docks and check out the cargo before their command appearance at breakfast and the repatriation ceremony.

  “Angelo–” Hot water sluiced across Vincent’s neck, easing discomfort he hadn’t noticed. He checked his chemistry. He could afford an analgesic. And a mild stimulant. Something to tide him over until breakfast, where he hoped there would be coffee.

  “Here.” He was in the fresher, his voice pitched soft and echoing slightly off the mirror as if he were leaned in close.

  “I need an Advocate.”

  Michelangelo’s silence was indulgence.

  Vincent listened to the water fall for thirty seconds, and then said, “Kyoto. She never got to say her piece at dinner.”

  “The terrifying old battleaxe? What topic?”

  “Biological determinism. Can you do it?”

  “Right.” Michelangelo cleared his throat. “The only significant natural predator that human women have is heterosexual men. The Amazonian social structure, with its strictures on male activity, has nothing to do with masculine intelligence or capability.”