That was fine. There were things that were more important to Vincent than the Coalition, too.
Such as bringing it down.
He sat up, rolled off the bed, and–without looking at Angelo–began to putter around their quarters. The suite was halfway up one of the asymmetrical towers. A single bedroom, with a bed big enough for four; a recreation area; and a fresher so primitive it used running water. Vincent had never actually seenone, apart from in antique records. The walls had the same simulated transparency as the “lobby” of the building, although now they showed the dark jungle and the phosphorescent sea. Overhead, blurred stars glowing through the dying nebula. Vincent paused for a moment to wonder at that–how the city itself vanished, except the bit he could see through the open window frame, and was replaced by the sensation of being alone in a reaching space.
The New Amazonians must have adapted, but he found it disconcerting. It wasn’t something a human architect would design for a living space. There was no coziness here, no safety of walls and den. This was a lair for a beast with wings, whose domain and comfort were the open sky.
Vincent grinned at Michelangelo, and nodded to the bed. “Do you want a nap before dinner?”
Michelangelo tapped his watch. “I’m on chemistry. And three months of cryo. I’ll be fine.” As if cryo were rest.
“Do you suppose the mattress squeaks?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” The smoke in Angelo’s voice was enough to curl Vincent’s toes. All lies. “Besides, I need to do my forms. Do you want first turn in the fresher?”
Vincent knew when he was beaten. He shrugged and switched his wardrobe off, pretending he didn’t notice Michelangelo’s lingering, to‑all‑appearances‑appreciative glance as the foglets swarmed into atmospheric suspension, misty streaks across his body before they left him naked. “If I can figure out how to work it,” he said, and walked through the arch into the antechamber, Michelangelo’s eyes on every step.
The fresher was primitive but the controls were obvious, the combined bath and shower a deep tub with dials on the wall, handles marked blue and red, a nozzle overhead. A washbasin and a commode completed the accommodations, and Vincent had the technology worked out in three ticks.
He stepped down into the tub–there were stairs, very convenient–and set the dial for hot.
Lesa didn’t have time to go home and change before dinner. Fortunately, the government center was all smart suites, and she’d had the foresight to stash a change of clothes in her office. She wouldn’t even have to commandeer one of the rooms for visiting dignitaries.
She ordered the door locked and stripped out of her suit, leaving it tossed across the back of her chair. She placed her honor on the edge of the desk, avoiding the blotter so she wouldn’t trigger her system, and turned to face the wall. “House, I need a shower, please.”
There had been no trace of a doorway in the transparent wall before her, but an aperture appeared as she spoke and irised wide. She passed through it, petting the city’s soap‑textured wall as she went by. It shivered acknowledgment and she smiled. Lights brightened as she entered, soothing shades of blue and white, and one wall smoothed to a mirror gloss.
House was still constructing the shower. She inspected her hair for split ends and her nose for black‑heads as she waited, but it didn’t take long. The floor underfoot roughened. The archway closed behind her and warm rain coursed from overhead. Lesa sighed and closed her eyes, turning her face into the spray. Her shoulders and back ached; she arched, spread her arms, lifted them overhead and stretched into a bow, then bent double and let her arms hang, pressing her face against her knees, waiting for the discomfort to ease.
The water smelled of seaweed and sweet flowers; it lathered when she rubbed her hands against her skin. She could have stayed in there all night, but she had things to do. “Conditioner and rinse, please,” she said, and House poured first oily and then clean hot water on her, leaving behind only a faint, lingering scent as it drained into the floor.
Her comb and toiletries were in her desk. She dried herself on a fluffy towel–which House provided in a cubbyhole, and which she gave back when she was done–and sat naked at her desk, wrinkling the dirty suit on her chair, to comb through her tangles and spy on her guests while she planned her attack.
“Show me the Colonial diplomats.” There was always a twinge of guilt involved in this, but it washer job, and she was good at it. Her blotter cleared, revealing the guest suite.
Miss Kusanagi‑Jones stood in the center of the floor, balanced and grounded on resilient carpetplant, his feet widely spaced in some martial‑arts stance. Eyes closed, his hands and feet moved in time with his breath as he slid sideways and Lesa leaned forward, fascinated. She’d suspected he was a fighter. He held himself right, collected, confident, but without the swaggering she was used to seeing on successful males. As if he didn’t feel the need to constantly claim his space and assert his presence.
She wondered if this was what combat training looked like on a gentle male, one whose strength wasn’t bent on reproduction and dominance. It suited him, she thought, watching his stocky, barrel‑chested body glide from form to form without rising or falling from a level line. He finished as she watched, then paused, a sheen of sweat making his dark skin seem to glow in comparison with his loose white trousers. Then he bowed formally and dropped into slow‑motion push‑ups, alternating arms.
Male arm strength. Which made it no less impressive.
Katherinessen came from the shower a moment later, naked and dripping slightly. Wisps of mist hung around him, and green, gold, and blue lights glowed through the tawny skin in the hollow of his left wrist. He touched them; the mist drifted in spirals about his body, and his hair and skin were dry. Even the water droplets on the leaves of the carpetplant ended abruptly, five steps from the shower door.
He was older than she’d thought, Lesa realized. He was a ropy man, long and lean, the fibers of his muscles clearly visible under the skin, but that skin had a soft, lived‑in look. He moved in his body unself‑consciously. She thought he might be showing himself off to his lover a little, which made her smile.
He could be anywhere from thirty‑five New Amazonian years to fifty; if he were a native she would have guessed thirty from the sparse gray in his hair and his relatively unlined face, but the Colonials stayed out of the sun; he might be much older.
And that was without accounting for the OECC’s medical technology. She’d heard they could live into their second century in vigorous health. It worried her; these men were the equivalents of Elders, if men had Elders, and if the Colonial Coalition had any sense at all, they would be as wily and problematic as anyone in the New Amazonian Parliament.
And they were men. Men with education and resources and the power of a multiworld organization behind them. But men,half crazy with evolutionary pressures half the time. The OECC couldn’t conquerNew Amazonia; they’d proven thatto everyone’s satisfaction. But if it ever decided that what New Amazonia had to offer wasn’t worth the trouble and loss of face its existence created–and if they could find enough reasons to justify their actions to the Governors–they could destroy it.
Bang. As easily as Lesa could lay down her comb, open the closet door with a word to House, and pull out her formal dress.
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 knownsmell, 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 Prй, 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 physicalcontact 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 cruditйs–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 dйtente, 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 va
nishing 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?”
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