Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  A glossy exterior that showed only the reflection of the person looking in.

  Except for now, when Michelangelo lifted himself, asking, and Vincent came to him. Exertion stung the tender skin on Vincent’s back and buttocks and sweat dripped into his eyes, scattering over Michelangelo’s shoulders as Angelo stretched under him. Vincent’s wardrobe was overloading again; he didn’t care. Headfucks and Venus flytraps and feedback loops were all right, but they didn’t satisfy the inner animal the way good, old‑fashioned, biological sexdid. Heart rate, brain chemistry, blood pressure–it all benefited from this: competition, cooperation, intercourse. Conversation, as much game as release.

  He rocked against Angelo, hands and mouth busy on whatever he could reach. Michelangelo answered him with sounds that might have indicated pain, if they hadn’t come in tandem with the eager motions of his hips and the clench of his hands in the bedclothes. Michelangelo flexed to meet his final, savage demands, and then they slumped together and pooled, relaxing.

  Everything’s better with a friend,Vincent thought, snorting with laughter.

  “Glad to know I amuse you,” replied the dryly muffled voice, Michelangelo slipping into their code.

  Vincent resettled against his back, racing heartbeats synchronizing. “What did that Ouagadougou woman want with you?”

  “You caught that?” Angelo sounded sleepy. “One of ours.”

  “Coalition?”

  “Mmm. Our contact. Slipped me a map this afternoon. Might do some exploring in a bit.”

  “Alone?”

  “Easier to countermeasure one than two, and I spent more time in the gallery than you did.”

  “What’s the gallery got to do with anything?”

  “Seems to be how you get there, if I’m reading this thing right–” Shoulders already whisked dry by utility fogs rose and fell against Vincent’s chest. “What’d you find out?”

  Vincent thought of the unexamined chip concealed under the table edge, and dropped his chin on Angelo’s shoulder. “House–The city, I mean. Lesa called it House.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think it’s an AI. Not sure if it’s sentient–I mean, self‑aware–or not, but it’s sure as hell sapient. It problem‑solves. And works from limited data to provide a best‑response.”

  “Tells us how the marines died.”

  “Sure. The city just…lured them where the Elders wanted them brought. And then walled them up. For as long as it took.”

  That brought a long silence, and then a sigh. “Hope the countermeasures work.”

  Vincent grunted. Michelangelo stretched again, the restless motion of hips and shoulders that meant get off me, oaf.

  Vincent rolled clear. “How will you bypass security?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Angelo. “Going to turn invisible.”

  Lesa made sure Agnes knew she wouldn’t be expecting Robert that night. She sat before her mirror, combing the brighteners into her hair, and contemplated the blankness with which Vincent had met her code phrase. A code phrase encoded on the chip he’dprovided, at the meet prearranged by Katherine Lexasdaughter.

  Which Robert had taken directly from his hand, palmed, and pressed immediately into hers. Vincent didn’t know who he was to meet on New Amazonia. Couldn’t know, before he made planetfall. It was too dangerous for everyone concerned.

  Which was why the elaborate system of double blinds and duplicity. Isolation. Containment. Any good conspiracy needs fire doors. Lesa had required a chance to assess Katherinessen before she–and more important Elena–revealed herself. But when she’d tried to make the final connection…

  Robert had palmed the chip and handed it directly to her.

  Lesa’s comb stopped in her hair. Robert had also been left alone with Vincent for at least half an hour before Lesa attempted to seal the contact.

  She untangled the comb carefully, reversed its field with a touch on the controls, and redacted the brighteners. When her hair was clean, she folded the comb into its slot in the wall and stood. She stepped over Walter to reach the house com on the wall by the door. “House, please contact Agnes.”

  A moment later, Agnes answered, and Lesa told her that under no circumstances was Robert to leave the Blue Rooms. Agnes wanted details, and Lesa was forced to admit she had none to offer, “–but trust me on this.”

  She was already pulling on her boots as she said it. When House ended the connection, she called through the fabric of a thin black mock‑neck for a car. She strapped on her honor, pulled her hair back into a plain tail, and hit the door at a trot.

  The car was waiting at the end of the alley. There were some perks to being a government employee.

  There were days when Kusanagi‑Jones wished he were better at lying to himself, and then there were the days when he was pretty sure he had it down to a science. While Vincent made idle conversation, he split his wardrobe under the covers of the bed they had made love in, left the remainder to assemble a warm, breathing, nanometer‑thick shell, and set what he retained to camouflage mode. When he stood up, as promised, he was invisible.

  Well, not trulyinvisible. But his wardrobe handled minor issues like refracting light around him through the same process by which it could provide a 360‑degree prospect in a combat situation, a lensing effect. It contained his body heat, presenting an ambient‑temperature surface to any thermal imaging devices, and it filtered carbon and other emissions.

  The drawback was that it would get hot and stuffy in there rather quickly. He would have to move fast.

  Kusanagi‑Jones stood against the wall beside the door as Vincent opened it and called Cathay inside on the excuse of wanting a late snack. She came, yawning, and Kusanagi‑Jones slipped past her before the door could iris shut.

  The second security agent outside wasn’t Shafaqat. They must be trading off. In any case, she was standing against the wall, admirably placed to see anyone coming in either direction down the short curved hall, but with only a peripheral view of the door at her back. Kusanagi‑Jones slipped past in complete silence, the only clue to his passage the dimpling of the carpetplant underfoot. She didn’t notice.

  The lift was a challenge, but it was out of sight around the curve of the hall. He spoke softly and the door glided open. He stepped inside. He wanted to breathe deeply, to savor feeling alive in his skin and the lingering tenderness of sex. But he kept his breaths short and slow, giving his wardrobe as much help as he could. He couldn’t afford to dwell on pleasant memories when he was here to fail the man who created them.

  Vincent waited until Cathay returned with a tray, toast and tea for two. He thanked her, then cleared Angelo’s solar collector from the edge of the open window. He sat on the ledge to eat the toast and drink the tea. Then he climbed back into bed beside the homunculus and repeated Angelo’s trick of mitosis. When he stood, he collected the unviewed chip from its hiding place and slotted it into his reader. The chip contained a map. He studied it while leaning out the window, examining the teeming city below.

  Then he put one foot up and rose into the frame.

  Anyone in the room would have registered nothing. No movement, no shifting of the light except a faint sparkle of mismatched edges if they had happened to look at the window just as he stepped up into it.

  It was a long way down. Vincent let go of the window frame, lifted his arms, and stepped out.

  Unlike a parachute, there was no shock as his wardrobe unfurled, growing filaments and tendrils festooned with catch pockets. The air resistance slowed him before he could build up falling velocity. He ballooned down like a spider, steering for a smooth dimple at the base of the tower, and landed squarely where he’d aimed. But faster than he should have; he rolled with it, but his knee twinged, and his wardrobe couldn’t quite absorb the shock enough to protect his sun‑seared shoulder. He whimpered when he hit, but the street noise was enough to cover that. In camouflage mode, his wardrobe would damp most of the noise anyway.

  Once t
he wardrobe contracted, he slithered down the curved roofline to drop to street level, earning another twinge from his knee. He checked the map; the meeting place was one square over, in the open. No proof against listening devices, but if his suspicions were right, a member of security directorate would be making sure no records remained.

  He slipped through the crowds into darkness, following the map through quieter streets. There were only a few reeling revelers here, and he avoided them easily. Somewhere in the distance, he heard fireworks or gunfire.

  He fully expected that the shadow awaiting him in the darkness under an arched walkway would be Lesa Pretoria. He hadn’t been sure until that evening, but the complex of her kinetics over dinner had convinced him, though she’d never dropped a recognition code. He paused in shadows to cancel the camouflage, dressed in local fashion and mocked up something that would pass from a distance for a street license with a quick accessory program–he didn’t have a license for a hat, but he had one for a wrist cuff–and presented himself boldly alongside the arch, circumnavigating merrymakers as he went, restraining the urge to press his hand to his aching shoulder. The pain was nauseating.

  He was drawing a breath to greet Miss Pretoria when an entirely different voice interrupted him, and a woman older and stouter than Lesa stepped into the light. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said. “I’m pleased you could get away.”

  “Elder Kyoto,” he choked. “This is a surprise.”

  Once Kusanagi‑Jones reached street level and slipped into the night, he moved faster. The unrippled pavement was sun‑warm under his feet, and he had little trouble winding through the scattered revelers by Gorgon‑light. The gallery lay across the square. Penthesilea’s government center was compact, and it wasn’t the center of the party. Kusanagi‑Jones only had to cope with the overflow.

  He heard music from elsewhere in the city, cheers and laughter that suggested a parade or theatrical event. He triggered the full‑circle display, the fisheye appearing in the lower corner of his sight where peripheral vision would pick it up. Years of training meant he’d react to it as fast as to a flicker in the corner of his eye, and as accurately.

  He passed between drunks and singers, hesitated at the report of gunfire and an echoing siren. Four shots, but they were distant and spaced like a duel, and though heads turned, nobody reacted more strongly. He crept around to the back of the gallery, to the broad doors where more trucks of repatriated art were being unloaded and the protectively wrapped bundles carted in, to be hung in accordance with the afternoon’s plan.

  He skulked inside.

  The lifts were running regularly. He simply stepped into an empty one, rode it down, ducked around a group of incoming laborers–mostly licensed men, and two armed women–and found himself at liberty in the gallery space.

  The instructions Miss Ouagadougou had provided were quite precise. He crossed the first gallery and ascended the stair under the watchful eyes of the frieze. When he reached the far corner, he paused. This adventure would have been considerably less nerve‑wracking if there were some mechanical means of opening the passage, something that could be hacked or bypassed.

  If Vincent was right, there was a machine intelligence watching him. And Kusanagi‑Jones could only hope its instructions didn’t include the casual destruction of off‑world human males poking about where they shouldn’t be.

  It wasn’t as long a gamble as it seemed. He had, at best, speculation that the city might take action if it construed a major threat to its inhabitants–such as a ships’ complement of Coalition marines. But Penthesilea remained an alien artifact, and if it could be efficiently reprogrammed or trained, he had no hope of carrying out his mission. And yet, here he was, against reason and sanity, doing what he did in the hope it didn’t have protocols in place to deal with saboteurs and spies.

  It was the old ambiguity that set his heart racing and dumped adrenaline into his bloodstream. Nobody sane would be here. But then, nobody sane would have taken this job in the first place. Especially when the most likely scenario, in the wake of the afternoon’s attempt on Vincent, had Miss Ouagadougou luring him to a lonely place where he could be abducted or disappeared.

  He lowered the audio damping, checked the fisheye display to make sure the gallery floor was clear, and asked House, please, to open the wall.

  Before he finished speaking, the frieze before him parted like drawn curtains. He stepped forward into an arched tunnel, unsurprised when the opening sealed itself behind him. An indirect glow rendered his light amplification redundant; he dialed it down, but in deference to his mistrust of Miss Ouagadougou he left the camouflage protocol intact.

  The tunnel was undecorated, smooth sided, the walls velvety and dark. It tended downward, the walls corded with shielded cables. Lesser ran into greater to form a vast, inverted mechanical root system, which thickened toward a trunk as he descended. The overall effect was Gigeresque, though the textures were more reminiscent of Leighton’s velvets and silks.

  He breathed easier. It was an access tunnel. Which meant, at least potentially, that Miss Ouagadougou had sent him to the right place. “Thank you,” he said, feeling slightly foolish. The city didn’t answer, but neither did the ongoing sense of observation (like a pressure between his shoulder blades) ease. He snorted softly when he realized he had expected it to, and kept walking.

  Brightness spilled up the corridor as it leveled. He paused to let his eyes adapt. His wardrobe handled dazzle, but didn’t ensure fine perception.

  Fifteen seconds sufficed. He blinked once more, to be sure, and stepped forward into a chamber not much larger than the suite he shared with Vincent. It was bowl shaped, the walls arching to meet overhead in a smooth, steep‑sided dome. He knew he was underground, but the depth of field in the images surrounding him was breathtaking. They were not just projected into the walls, but a full holographic display.

  If it weren’t for the tug of gravity on his boots, he might have been adrift in space. New Amazonia’s primary, Kali, glowed enormous and bittersweet orange on his left hand, smeared behind watercolor veils. On his right, totally out of perspective, floated New Amazonia, a cloud‑marbled berry with insignificant ice caps, incrementally closer to its primary than Earth was to Sol, partially shielded from Kali’s greater energy output by the Gorgon’s polychrome embrace.

  The fisheye showed him stars on every side. He turned toward the sun. And a peculiar thing happened. The nebula dimmed, parted along his line of sight, and left him staring at the filtered image of Kali. He knew it was filtered, because his wardrobe wasn’t blinking override warnings about staring into it, and everything around it didn’t flicker dim as the utility fog struggled to compensate. The bruise‑limned darkness of sunspots hung vivid against the glare, the ceaseless fidgeting of the corona marked abruptly by the dolphin leap of a solar arch. It seemed close enough to reach out his hand and touch, enormous, though his palm at full extension eclipsed the sphere.

  Teeth rolling his lower lip, Kusanagi‑Jones returned to New Amazonia. The veils swept back from it as well, focus tightening, and as the holographic point of view swept in, he found himself retracing the rough course of the lighter that had brought him to this planet. He circled Penthesilea, and there the image hesitated. Waiting, he realized. Hovering like a butterfly on trembling wingbeats, accommodating the wind.

  “House, show me the power generation system, please.”

  The image swooped again. A flying creature’s preferred perspective, as internal decor mimicking wide open spaces and empty skies would be comforting to a creature with wings, where an ape’s descendent might feel cozy with limited perspectives and broken sight lines, the indication of places to hide.

  The sense of falling made his fingers flex, trying to clutch a railing that wasn’t there. He mastered himself, despite the sense that there was nothing to stand on as images rushed past incomprehensibly fast. And then they paused, arrested sharply, and he found himself staring at the back of his own head,
the wooly curls of a dark man in a star‑spangled room.

  His fisheye–and his own eyes–showed him that the image hewatched hadn’t changed. But the room around the virtual Kusanagi‑Jones dissolved, vanished into clear air, leaving him standing at the bottom of a sphere whose every surface writhed with twisted cable. It was a strangely organic growth, fractal in the way it merged and combined, coming together in a massive, downward‑tending trunk beneath Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet.

  The hologram had stripped away the chamber’s walls, showing him what lay behind them. His neck chilled. He rubbed his palms against his thighs. “Follow the cables, please.”

  The perspective zoomed down– throughhim, and he blinked at the glimpse of meat and bone and wiring and a momentary cross‑section of a pulsing heart–and chased the tunneling cables down, down, to bedrock and a cavern in the depth‑warmed darkness.

  He was no electrical engineer. But an encyclopedic education, RAM‑assisted parsing, and the information he’d chipped when he came out of cryo identified most of the machinery. Capacitors, transformers, batteries, a bank of quantum processors big enough to run a starship: essentially, an electrical substation the size of some Earth cities.

  And no sign whatsoever of a generator. Just the power endlessly flowing from the quantum array–

  Fromthe quantum array.

  “Shit,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. He had an excellent memory. He could recall Elder Singapore’s slightly amused tone precisely, as she had said, But you can’t get there from here.“The power source isn’t on this planet.”

  A flicker of motion in his fisheye alerted him a split second before an urbane, perfectly modulated voice answered him. He turned, binocular vision better than peripheral, the fisheye snapping down on the sudden motion and giving him a blurred preview that didn’t remotely prepare him.