Two stud males–if they were,and she honestly didn’t think so–on the loose and unlicensed in Penthesilea were unlikely to bring down society. But by the same token, Lesa wouldn’t let a tame fexa run loose in the city. There was always the chance somebody would get bitten.
The irony of that concern, compared to the gender treason she was plotting, made her smile bitterly.
“Miss Pretoria,” Katherinessen said, as the waiter removed his plate, “you’re staring at me.” He hadn’t looked up.
“Are there circumstances under which the well‑being of a minority doesmatter? Circumstances of gross injustice?”
“Oppression? Such as the status of men on New Amazonia?”
Elder Kyoto, the minister of security, waved her fork. “There are sound behavioral–”
“Just so,” Claude said. The other guests went quiet. “Or what the Coalition would like to do to New Amazonia, to bring it under hegemony. Setting all that aside for the moment–as civilized people should be able to do”–and it seemed to Lesa that Claude reserved a particularly bland smile for Kusanagi‑Jones–“is it still an interesting question on its own merits?”
Katherinessen steepled long fingers. Dessert was being served. He declined a pastry just as Lesa warned them that there was most likely butter in the crust, but both males accepted coffee without cream.
Katherinessen tasted the coffee as soon as it was set before him, buying a few more moments to consider his answer and unconcerned with his transparency. “Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge even the existenceof abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can–social, biological, what have you. May we agree on that?”
Claude’s smile slid from bland toward predatory. “Mostly.”
“Then let me raise a counterquestion. Do you believe an egalitarian society is possible?”
“Define egalitarian.”
“Advancement based solely on merit.” Katherinessen smiled at his partner, who was stolidly stirring his coffee over and over again. “As Angelo is fond of pointing out to me, I have certain advantages of birth. My family is well regarded in society on Ur. By comparison, on Old Earth before Assessment, any of us would have been disadvantaged due to our skin tone–if we lived in the industrialized world.”
“Protected by it, later,” Kusanagi‑Jones said under his breath. He was leaning on the arm of his chair, toward Lesa; she thought she was the only one who heard it.
Claude didn’t answer immediately. She nodded around the excuse of a bite of pastry, forked up in haste, as if inspecting Katherinessen’s words for the trap. “So even Assessment wasn’t an equalizer. Not a fresh start.”
“It was the opposite of an equalizer.” Katherinessen shrugged. “Each round of Assessed were chosen on the grounds of arbitrary standards programmed into the Governors before they were released. It was the epitome of unnatural selection, for an elite. Agriculturists, scientists, engineers, programmers, diplomats, artisans, and none of them Caucasian–what more arbitrary set of criteria could you imagine for survival?”
Lesa laid her fork down. “I don’t believe equality exists.”
Elder Kyoto glanced around. “Why not?”
“Because Miss Katherinessen is right, but doesn’t take it far enough. Not only will whoever’s on top fight to stay there, but if you reset everyone to equality, whoever wins the scramble for power will design the rules to stay there.”
Katherinessen nodded. “So what do you think ispossible?”
“If I were the oppressed?”
A short pause, with eyebrow. “Sure.”
Lesa wondered if she could startle him. The Colonials didthink everybody on New Amazonia was an idiot, or at least naive. That much was plain. “Conquest. Revolution. Dynamic change would ensure that nobody ever wound up holding too much power. Fortunately for me, as a member of the ruling class, people tend to prefer the status quo to unrest unless they’re very unhappy. Which is why the Coalition isn’t entirely welcome here.”
She picked her fork up again and began flaking apart the buttery layers of pastry, not so much eating as pushing them around on the plate to cover the gilding. Katherinessen sighed. She thought it was satisfaction. She didn’t want to feel the answering glow in herself, as if she’d just done well on a test.
“You are so very right.” Katherinessen glanced at Kusanagi‑Jones, who had stopped stirring his coffee, but wasn’t drinking.
“You know what they say,” Kusanagi‑Jones quipped. “Dйtente is achieved when everybody’s unhappy.”
The bipeds communicate. There are the new ones, the males in their dual‑gender system. Kii supposes one biologically convenient system for randomizing genetic material is as good as another, but the bipeds also use theirs as a basis for an arcane system of taboos and restrictions. At first Kii thinks this is adaptively obligated, that the child‑bearing sex was responsible for the protection of the offspring, and the society was structured around that need. There are local animals with similar adaptations–unlike the Consent, unlike the khir–where the greatest danger to cubs is posed by unrelated males, which prey on the offspring of other males.
Kii is startled to find an intelligent species retaining such atavistic tendencies. But then, Kii is also startled to find an intelligent species evolve without also evolving the Consent, or something like it. And since the territorial dispute, Kii is forced to acknowledge that no matter how developed their technology and aesthetics, the bipeds have no Consent.
Kii wonders if the other population of bipeds, encroaching again on the ones Kii thinks of as Kii’s bipeds, intend another territorial dispute. The timeslip is threads that converge and threads that part; patterns of interference. It is a wave that has not collapsed. The nonlocal population may transgress, driven, Kii thinks, by outstripping its habitat. There may be another dispute. The probability is not insignificant that the local population of aliens will be overrun. Kii is possessive of the aliens, and Kii’s possessiveness informs the Consent.
If the other population encroaches, Kii wishes to intervene again, more strongly than before. The Consent is not so sanguine.
Yet.
5
EVEN VINCENT WAS RELIEVED WHEN DINNER ENDED, though it segued without hesitation into another endless reception. This one at least had more the air of a party, and finally there were a number of other men present.
As soon as they left the table, the elder Pretoria cut Michelangelo off Vincent’s arm as neatly as impoverished nobility absconding with an heiress at a debutante’s ball. Despite Michelangelo’s long‑suffering eyeroll, he went, flirting gamely.
Vincent took this as a sign that the business portion of the evening had ended, and availed himself of the bar. He wasn’t going to get drunk–his watch would see to that–but he would examine the options. It would give him something to do with his hands while considering the evening’s haul.
He accepted the drink he’d pointed to in a moment of bravado–something greenish‑gold and slightly cloudy, a spirit infused with alien herbs, if his nose didn’t mislead him–and leaned into a quiet corner, for the moment observed by no one except the security detail, who appeared to be making sure he didn’t wander off.
It was a reversal of his and Michelangelo’s usual roles, but not an unpracticed one. Michelangelo could pretend to charisma as effectively as anything else, and dominate a room with ease. And the dynamics of an assembly such as this could be revealing. It was like watching a dance that was also combat and a game of chess.
Miss Pretoria, for example, was leaving a conversational cluster that included the person Vincent had tentatively identified as the minister of the militia–of Security, he corrected himself, which was a significant choice of title on its own–and crossing to the group that encompassed Michelangelo and Elena Pretoria, and a tall, beautifully dressed, dark‑skinned man with a shaved‑slick scalp. With whom, Vincent noticed, Michelangelo was now
flirting. Vincent’s fingers curled on his glass, and he pressed his shoulders against the warm, slightly vibrating wall of the building, feeling it conform to his body.
The prime minister and her entourage occupied a space that was more or less on the left center of the ballroom, and somehow managed to give the impression of being off in a corner–and one diametrically opposed to the Pretoria household at that. And there was something else interesting: as Lesa crossed the room, nobody wanted to catch her eye, despite her occasional nods and words she shared with those she passed. Unobtrusively, a path opened before her, but it wasn’t the standing aside of respect. It was a withdrawal. I wonder what she is when she’s not a tour guide and turnkey.
He dug his toes into the groundcover and watched. People could give themselves away in the oddest manners. Even simply by the ways in which they made sure of their guard. For example, the faint discomfort with which Lesa responded to a broad‑shouldered, bronzed man who entrapped her a few steps from the relative haven of her mother’s enclave. He had long hair cut blunt at his shoulders, the fair, blondish‑brown color and coarse wavy texture even more unusual than Vincent’s auburn, and his hands were knotted whitely with old scars. He spoke softly, eyes averted, and Lesa reached out and tucked a strand of that wonderful hair behind his ear in a good counterfeit of flirtation before excusing herself to join her family.
Vincent was just finally getting around to paying some attention to his drink when the minister of Security–the one who had been about to bring biology into the dinner argument until Singapore shut her down–appeared at his elbow. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said, mispronouncing his name kath‑er‑in‑ES‑sen,“I’m sorry to see you’ve been abandoned.”
She held out her hand and he took it gingerly. The wine on her breath bridged the distance between them easily. The New Amazonian disregard for personal space, but also something more.
He would have stepped back, but he was already against the wall. “I’m self‑amusing,” he said, and met her gaze directly, the way Penthesilean men did not.
She edged closer, oozing confidence. She expected him to be intimidated and perhaps flattered as she laid her hand on his arm. He’d seen the expression on her face on enough old warhorses cornering sweet young things at embassy parties: a predator gloating over trapped prey.
He was supposed to blush and look down, and maybe sidle away. Instead, he pictured Michelangelo standing where he was standing now, and burst out laughing.
She stepped back, abruptly, covering her discomfiture with a scowl. “I wasn’t aware I was so amusing.”
“Actually,” Vincent said, stepping around her now that he’d bought himself room, “I find the corner by the door’s the best place to be. Are you attending the ceremony tomorrow, Elder?”
He turned to face her, which put his own back to the room–but that wasn’t too unsettling when Michelangelo had it covered. And now she was the one trapped against the wall, which was a tactical gain.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” she said. “We’ve arranged a meeting with some technical specialists afterward, who can explain what we’re prepared to offer for our part of the deal. I’m sure Lesa’s made sure you have a copy of the schedule.”
“She functions as a secretary, too?” Vincent asked with a thickly insincere smile. He stepped back as Kyoto stepped forward. Miss Pretoria was coming up behind him, and he sidestepped, as if accidentally, opening the tкte‑а‑tкte. One, two, three, four–“A multitalented individual.”
“Why, thank you, Miss Katherinessen,” Pretoria said, and then let her eyes rest on the minister of Security. “Oh, Elder. I didn’t see you back there, behind this great wall of a man. I’m sorry to interrupt, but his partner asked me to fetch him–”
She smiled, and Vincent wondered if the venom was as apparent to Kyoto as to him. Perhaps not, because Kyoto excused herself and brushed past them with every indication of calm.
Vincent tilted the glass against his mouth, inhaling redolence that stung his eyes, and smiled at the warden as he licked a droplet off the cleft of his lips. The liquor, now that he finally tasted it, was good, warm on the tongue. And if he wasn’t mistaken, it had enough kick to shift a moon in orbit.
He shifted the glass to his left hand to extend the right. He was adapting to thatlocal quirk, at least. Her clasp was still warm and firm. “I am indebted beyond words.”
“She’s good at her job,” Pretoria said.
“Did Angelo really send you to the rescue?” Vincent would have expected Michelangelo to take a special kind of lingering pleasure in watching him twist, actually, but he would take pity if it was on offer.
“I suggested to him that he–and you–might want to sneak downstairs and indulge in a little tourism…I mean, inspect the gallery space. What do you say?”
Vincent finished his drink. So Pretoria was avoiding the fair‑haired man, and Vincent’s own presumed desire to avoid Elder Kyoto was a convenient excuse. “Grab your security and let’s go.”
Kusanagi‑Jones glanced up as Vincent laid a gentle hand on his arm and insinuated himself into the conversational circle. “We’re escaping,” Vincent murmured against his ear, and Kusanagi‑Jones nodded while Miss Pretoria made excuses to her mother involving long trips and early rising.
“Whatever the warden wants,” Kusanagi‑Jones replied, using Vincent’s body to cover the shape of the words. Vincent steered him out of the group as he made his farewells. There was a scent of liquor and herbs on Vincent’s breath, and Kusanagi‑Jones sighed wistfully. “Don’t suppose you saved me any of that.”
“Sorry. We’ll get room service later.”
“They overcharge for the licenses in hotels.”
Vincent laughed under his breath and gave Kusanagi‑Jones’s arm a squeeze. “Miss Pretoria wants to show us the gallery.”
“That’s the wardento you,” she said, falling into step. She met Kusanagi‑Jones’s guilty look with a toss of her rainbow hair, but she grinned. “Oh, yes, I heard that.”
“Just as well,” Vincent said, releasing Kusanagi‑Jones’s arm after one more caress. “What do you do when you’re not shepherding visiting dignitaries, Warden?”
She shrugged. “You just met my boss. I’m security directorate. I review licensing for gentle males and others.”
“Political officer,” Vincent said. She wasn’t tall, but she moved with direction and strength. If she had been wearing boots, they would have been thumping on the groundcover. Even the security detail was hustling to keep up.
She flipped her hair behind her ear again. It kept escaping in ways a grooming license would not permit. “You could say that.”
The curved corridor opened into a bell‑shaped chamber. She selected a side corridor. Kusanagi‑Jones noticed she was running the tips of her fingers down the left‑hand wall. “Just here–”
Another room, this one long and narrow like a gallery. The walls were the faux‑transparent type, the ceiling view of a perfect, cloudless night sky.
“This is the museum?” Kusanagi‑Jones asked. “Where’s the art? Doesn’t the sunlight damage it?”
Miss Pretoria smiled, seeming pleased that he’d broken his silence, but she addressed them both as she waved them forward. “It’s downstairs,” she said. “Underground. Come along.”
Penthesilea looked small on the surface, but Kusanagi‑Jones had gained a hard‑won appreciation for how rarely appearances matched actuality. After the arena, he wasn’t surprised by the scale of the underground city.
They stepped from a lift into a cavernous space. The air here was cool, the illumination indirect, bright but soothing, with long splashes of light reflecting from scrollworked eggshell‑white walls. Vincent cleared his throat. After glancing at Miss Pretoria for permission, Vincent reached out and softly ran his hand over the decorations, if that was what they were. Kusanagi‑Jones resisted the urge, despite the tactile charm.
Vincent said, “If the original inhabitants–”
&n
bsp; “The Dragons.”
“The Dragons. If they could fly, why the lift?”
“It’s new.”
“Do you understand the technology that well?” And Vincent made it sound casual, startled. Natural. Kusanagi‑Jones wondered if Pretoria was fooled.
Truthfully, though, he listened with only half an ear to the conversation. His attention was on the security detail, the multidimensional echoes caused by the cavern’s organic shapes, the possibility of an attack. He was surprised by how freely they were permitted to move; on Earth, there would have been an entourage, press, a gaggle of functionaries. Here, there was just the three of them, and the guards.
Convenient. Andindicative of even more societal differences that would be positively treacherous to navigate. As if the openly armed women hadn’t been enough of a hint.
“…this seems like a very fine facility,” Vincent said. He moved casually, his hands in his pockets as he leaned down to Miss Pretoria, diminishing her disadvantage in height. “Controlled humidity and temperature, of course.”
“Yes. These are the galleries that were emptied by the OECC robbers in the Six‑Weeks‑War,” she said. Her body language gave no hint that she considered any potential to offend in her phrasing. It was matter‑of‑fact, impersonal.
And this is a diplomat,Kusanagi‑Jones thought. He trailed one hand along the wall; the texture was soapy, almost soft. He imagined a faint vibration again, as before, but when he tuned to it, he thought it might just be the wind swaying the fluted towers so far overhead. They’ve been alone out here a very long time. Long enough that awareness of ethnocentrism is a historical curiosity.
He stroked the wall again, trying to identify the material. It didn’t come off on his fingers, but it felt like it should. Like graphite or soapstone–slick without actually being greasy. There was a geologist’s term, but he couldn’t remember it.
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