Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  “That’s sad,” he said. “When you think about it. You don’t know what happened to the Dragons?”

  “We don’t,” she said, both alert to his prying for information and fighting the urge to trust him. Everything she could read on him said he was honest–as honest as a double agent could be–and the chip’s information confirmed everything she thought she knew. She had to raise her voice to carry over the street noise, the melodious thunder of a steel drum. “But I believe they died. Somehow.”

  His eyes were shadowed under the hat when he turned them on her, but they still caught fragments of light and glowed like sunlit honey. “You have a reason to think so?”

  “Miss Katherinessen,” she said, leading him around the crowd gathered about the musicians, out of the shade gallery and into the hotter, less‑crowded street, while Shafaqat followed five steps behind. “I guess you’ve never had a pet?”

  It could have been a facetious question, but he saw by her eyes that she was serious. “No,” he said. “Tamed animals aren’t permitted in the Coalition. It’s unnatural.”

  “A lot of animals have symbiotes,” she said, threading through the pressing crowd.

  Michelangelo would have a fit. All these people, and not just close enough to touch, but packed together so that one could not avoid touching. The streets were a blurof people, brightly clothed, drenched in scent or sweat or both, hatted and parasoled against the consuming light. The clamor of music was everywhere, instruments he recognized from historical fiche and instruments he didn’t recognize at all, and ancient standbys like saxophone, trombone, and keyboard synthesizer, as if the entire city had spontaneously transformed into something that was half marching band and half orchestra.

  Pedestrians threw money to some musicians. Others had no cup out, and accepted beads or garlands of flowers or offerings of food. He couldn’t follow one song for more than a bar or two–they laddered up each other and interwove, clashing. The sheer press of people was as dizzying as the heat.

  Vincent surreptitiously dialed his wardrobe down and hurried to keep up with the warden. “You don’t think it’s immoral to enslave animals?”

  “I don’t think it’s slavery.” She paused by what he would have called a square, a pedestrian plaza, except it was anything but square. Or geometrically regular, for that matter.

  He should have known better than to continue the same old argument, but if he could resist an opening, he wouldn’t have the job he did. “And what about treating your husband as chattel? Is that not slavery?”

  “I’m not married,” she snapped, and then flushed and looked down. Shafaqat coughed into her hand.

  Vincent concealed his smile, and filed that one under touchy subjects. “And?”

  “No,” Pretoria said. “It’s not slavery either. You hungry?”

  She looked him straight in the eye when she changed the subject, which was how Vincent knew she was lying. And her smile when he rocked back said she saw him noticing. That would be entirely too convenient.

  “I could eat,” he said, though the bustling mall reeked of acid sweetness and perfumes and scorched flesh.

  “This is the place to get lunch. I think we can find you something that was never self‑aware, although you may be forced to eat it seasoned with a flying insect or two.” She extended her arm, which he took.

  “I can live with the death of a few bugs on my conscience.”

  “Hypocrite,” she said. But she laughed. “Doesn’t it get tiring being so damned morally superior all the time?”

  Kusanagi‑Jones managed to forget Vincent’s absence quickly. Miss Ouagadougou was pleasant, efficient, and capable, and there was a lot of work to accomplish. The three largest pieces would form the backbone and focal point of the display. Two of the three were twentieth‑century North American–one just a fragment, and both remnants of a much larger public artwork.

  Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t think those anything special. Perhaps they’d be more meaningful in context, but it seemed to him that their status as cultural treasures was based on their provenance rather than on their art. They were historical works by women; it might be enough for the New Amazonians, but Kusanagi‑Jones hoped his own aesthetic standards were somewhat higher.

  The third piece, though, he couldn’t denigrate. Its return was a major sacrifice, big enough to make him uneasy. The level of commitment betrayed by the Cabinet permitting such a treasure to slip beyond its grasp indicated desperation. Desperation, or no actual intent to let the sculpture go for long.

  Officially, Catharine Kimberly was considered a minor artist, but Kusanagi‑Jones had seen some of her other work, and he didn’t think Phoenix Abasedwas the aberration that most scholars maintained. It was a marble sculpture–real marble, quarried stone, one of the last. Larger than life‑size, it depicted a nude woman overcome with grief, her hips twisted by a drawn‑up knee, her upper body thrown forward as if she had been knocked down or she was prostrating herself, sprawled into the abject line of her extended arms, which she seemed–by the sprung muscles of her neck, buttocks, and torso–to be fighting the miring stone.

  They weren’t precisely arms, though. Where reaching fingers should have splayed, consuming stone gave the suggestion of wings. Broken feathers scattered the base of the sculpture, tumbled down her shoulders, tangled in the mossy snarl of hair framing her pain‑saturated face. Her head was turned, straining upward, her mouth open in a hurtful Oand her eyes–roughly suggested, thumbprint shadows–tight shut. As if her wings were failing her, crumbling, shed, leaving her mired in unhewn stone.

  And now that her wrappings were off, and he stood before her in person, he could see what the fiche couldn’t show. She did not merely grovel, but struggled, dragging against the inexorable stone and wailing aloud as it consumed her.

  Her body was fragile, bony, imperfect. She was too frail to save herself. She was devoured.

  Perhaps the artist was only a woman. Perhaps she’d never created another work to compare to this raw black‑and‑ocher‑streaked masterpiece. But then, she might have, might she not? If she had lived.

  And this was enough. It had impact,a massive weight of reality that pressed his chest like a stone. His eyes stung and he shivered.

  Whatever the evidence of her name–and Kusanagi‑Jones would be the first to admit that pre‑Diaspora naming conventions were a nightmare from which he was still trying to awaken–Catharine Kimberly had been a dark‑skinned South African woman who lived at the time of first Assessment and the rise of the Governors.

  Operating under their own ruthless program, the Governors had first subverted the primitive utility fogs and modulars of their era, turning industrial and agricultural machines to the purpose of genocide. Domestic animals and plants had been the first victims, destroyed as the most efficient solution to a hopeless complex of ethical failings. Better to die than reproduce as chattel.

  Then the Northerners had been Assessed, for their lifestyle and history of colonial exploitation. Following that, persons of European and Chinese descent, regardless of talent or gender.

  Billions of corpses produced an ecological dilemma resolved through the banking and controlled release of organic compounds. Salvage teams were allowed to enter North American, Asian, and European cities, removing anything of cultural value that they could carry away, and then the cities were Terraformed under layers of soil produced by the breakdown of human and agricultural detritus.

  After that, the tricky work began.

  During the Vigil–the seven‑year gap between first Assessment and the final extensive round–those survivors who could find a way were permitted to take flight. At the end of the Vigil, those remaining on Earth had been culled, using parameters set by the radicals who had created the Governors and died to teach them to kill.

  The exempt were an eclectic group. Among them were poets, sculptors, diplomats, laborers, plumbers, scientists, engineers, surgeons. Those who created with their minds or with their hands. A chosen popu
lation of under fifty million. Less than one in two hundred left alive.

  Catharine Kimberly had been spared that first Assessment. And so she had completed Phoenix Abased. And then she had taken her own life.

  Which was a sort of art in itself.

  Kusanagi‑Jones reached out, left‑handed, and ran his fingers down the cool, mutilated stone. It was smooth, flinty to the touch. He could pretend that he felt some energy in it, a kind of strength. Mysticism and superstition, of course, but Kimberly’s grief gilded the surface of her swan song like a current tickling his fingertips. He sniffed and stepped back, driving his nails into his palm. And looked up to find Miss Ouagadougou smiling at him.

  “It’s a powerful piece,” she said, kindly patronizing. Just an emotional male, after all.

  He smiled, and played to it. “Never actually seen it before. It’s revered–”

  “But not displayed?”

  “Not in Cairo,” he said. “We don’t travel to other cities much. Wasteful. It’s different to touch something.” He shrugged. “Not that I would rub my hands over it normally, but–”

  “Curator’s privilege,” she said. She bent from the waist, her hands on her knees, and stared into the wailing woman’s empty eyes. “Tell me about your name.”

  “My name?”

  She turned, caught him with a smile. Like all the New Amazonians, she seemed old for her age, but also fit, and his threat‑ready eye told him that she was stronger than she looked. “Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones. Quite the mouthful. Are those lineage names?”

  “Michelangelo–”

  “For the artist, of course. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.”

  “Show‑off,” he said, and her smile became a grin. She straightened up, hands on her hips, and rolled her shoulders back. Volatile male, he thought, and Lied to her a little. It wasn’t hard. If he didn’t think about it, if he wasn’t consciously manipulating someone, it happened automatically. He wasn’t sure he’d know an honest reaction if he had one. And if Miss Ouagadougou wanted to flirt, he could flirt with the best.

  Second‑best. There was always Vincent.

  “Yes,” he said. “For the artist.”

  “And Miss Katherinessen is named for Vincent van Gogh?”

  He backed away from Phoenix Abasedand framed it with his hands. “Named for the twentieth‑century poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ur has its own conventions. And his mother is a fan.”

  “And what about the rest of it?”

  “Katherinessen?”

  “No, I understand a matronymic. Osiris.”

  “Egyptian god of the dead. After the Vigil and the second Assessment, most of the survivors…you understand that it was rare for more than one member of a family to survive.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I think the Glenna Goodacre piece should be in the middle. The Maya Lin fragment to block sight lines as one enters”–it was an enormous mirror‑bright rectangle of black granite, etched with a list of men’s names–“and then as you come around, Goodacre and Kimberly beyond.”

  “Saving the best for last.”

  She paced him as he continued to back away, trying the lay of the hall from various perspectives. “Precisely. So your ancestors…constructed new families? Renamed themselves?”

  “After heroes and gods and historical figures.”

  “And artists.”

  “Sympathetic magic,” Michelangelo said. “Art was survival.”

  “For us it was history.” Miss Ouagadougou slid her fingers at full extension down glossy black granite. “Proof, I guess–”

  “Of what came before.”

  “Yes.” The tendons along the side of her neck flexed as she turned to stare at him. “Do you wonder what it was like?”

  “Before the Governors? Sometimes.”

  “It must be better now,” she said. “From what I’ve read. But still, the price.”

  “Too much.” Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones. The futility of his own name stunned him. Five meaningless words. Five cultures, five entire racesof people. And all that was left of them, the living rememberer of all those millions of dead, was the syllables of a Liar’s name.

  He swallowed. It hurt.

  Her fingers brushed the wall again and fell away from the black granite. “It’s lunchtime,” she said. “I understand you have some dietary restrictions to consider. Shall we see what we can find to eat while the staff rearranges the display? We’ll come back to it after.”

  “I’d like that.” He looked away from the wall, which was a mistake, because it put him face to face with Kimberly’s murdered angel. “I’d like that very much.”

  9

  VINCENT’S WARDROBE COULDN’T KEEP UP WITH THE sweat. It slicked his neck, rolled in beads down his face, and soaked the underside of his hair and a band where the borrowed hat rested on his head. His hands were still greasy from a lunch of some fried starchy fruit and tubers, served in a paper wrapper, and his wardrobe was too overwrought to deal with it.

  He mopped his face on his sleeve, further stressing foglets already strained by the jostling crowd and the press of his escort on either side, and tried to regulate his breathing. The nausea was due to the heat, he thought, and not the food; his watch didn’t report any problems beyond mild dehydration and a slightly elevated body temperature, which he was keeping an eye on. It wasn’t dangerous yet, just uncomfortable, but Miss Pretoria was tireless. She tugged Vincent’s sleeve to direct his attention to a Dragon costume operated by two men, the one managing the front limbs walking on stilts and operating paired extensions from his wrists that simulated the beast’s enormous wings. “How could something that big fly?” he asked, checking his step to let the puppet shamble past.

  “They must have been somewhat insubstantial for their size,” Miss Pretoria said. “The khir, which are the Dragons’ closest living relatives, have a honeycombed endoskeleton that leaves them much lighter than an equivalent terrestrial mammal. So the Dragons would have been about the same weight and wingspan as the largest pterosaurs. And we think they soared more than flew, and may have been highly adapted climbers.” She turned to watch the puppet proceed down the street, bowing and dancing, bells shimmering along the span of the wings.

  Her eyes widened as she turned to him. “Miss Katherinessen, you should have said something.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I think we’d better get you out of the heat.” She turned to Shafaqat, gesturing her forward. “Would you call for a car, Miss Delhi? And get Miss Katherinessen something to drink? We’re going to find some shade.”

  “I’m fine,” Vincent said, as Pretoria latched onto his wrist and tugged him toward a side street where the buildings would block most of the glaring light. “Nothing a cold shower and a glass of ice water wouldn’t cure.”

  Pretoria clucked her tongue and bulldozed over him. “You’re not adapted to this climate, and I’m notexplaining to my mother why it is that a Coalition diplomat suffered heat exhaustion under my care, no matter how manly you need to prove you are.”

  He checked over his shoulder. Shafaqat moved through the press of bodies efficiently, her height, bearing, and uniform gaining a certain deference even from costumed, staggering merrymakers. Vincent had never seen a crowd like this on a Coalition planet: jostling, singing, shouting, raucously shoulder to shoulder and yet decorously polite. He wondered if it was a side effect of living packed into their alien cities, encircled by the waiting jungle, or of their rigid social strictures and their armed obeisance to the code duello.

  Pretoria’s hand cooled his skin as she pulled him into the shady side street, which wasn’t any less crowded than the square. She pulled his wrist out and up as he made the choice to let her touch him without resistance. It was foreign, invasive. His skin crawled and stung when she pulled back, steadying his hand with her other one, and bent over it.

  “You’re burned,” she said. “Not too badly, I think, but it’s going to hurt b
y tonight.”

  “That’s impossible. My wardrobe should filter UV–”

  But his wardrobe was overstressed, and of course he’d had to dial it down to keep it from zapping pedestrians–or Miss Pretoria, with her frontier touchiness. She squeezed his wrist, and the cool pressure of her palm turned to shocking heat. He yelped and yanked his hand away.

  “Sunburn,” she said. “Good thing you wore long sleeves.” And then she reached out and caught his shoulders, pushing him against the wall, and he would have shrugged her away but the blood roared in his ears and the orange status lights flickered in his watch. The street swam around him, aswarm with people who might have been staring at him curiously if he could have focused on their faces. “You know,” he said, uncertainly, “I don’t feel too well at all.”

  Her hand closed on his wrist again, searing, as she tugged him into motion. Shafaqat reappeared on his other side. “Miss Pretoria?” Something icy and dripping touched his hand.

  “Drink that, Vincent. Miss Delhi, did you call the car?”

  “I’m fine,” Vincent insisted, even though he couldn’t quite lift his feet. He broke Pretoria’s grip, more roughly than he had intended, and ducked his head, blinking, as he tried to get a good look at the display on his watch. Nausea made him gulp. “I don’t think I should drink anything.”

  They ignored him. “It’s on the way,” Shafaqat said. “Where are we going?”

  “Redirect it to Pretoria house. We can get him there and into a cold shower by the time it could reach us and find a place to land in this crowd, and it’ll be a huge flap if we have to send him to the clinic.” Miss Pretoria cursed. “I’m an idiot. I thought he would tell me if it got to be too much.”

  “Men,” Shafaqat said. Vincent could picture the twist of her mouth from her tone.