Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  He could always tellVincent. But the questions would inevitably lead to New Earth, and the death of the Skidbladnir.

  Not that it mattered. The choice wasn’t a choice. It was just torture, and part of the pain was knowing how it would end.

  “I need an Advocate,” Kusanagi‑Jones muttered, as Saide Austin paused at the bottom of the steps to shake three more hands and then, adjusting her heavy rings, her robes swaying around her sandal‑corded ankles, ascended majestically.

  “After lunch,” Vincent answered, with a curious glance.

  Kusanagi‑Jones nodded. The stage had the same curious resilience as the pavement; it felt almost buoyant under his boots as he retraced his steps and reached out to assist Elder Austin up the last stair.

  Her hands matched her girth and her shoulders, wide fingered and strong. Her rings pinched him as he hauled her up, and when he pulled back his hand there was a line of blood in the crease of his finger.

  She stepped closer, concerned, when he raised the hand to examine. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Nothing serious,” he said. His docs were already sealing the wound and a reflexive check for contaminants showed nothing; his watch lights blinked green and serene under the skin. One thing about intelligence work in the diplomatic corps: they paid for the best. “It won’t bother me long.” And as she smiled, chagrined, and turned aside to take Vincent’s hand, he reached out to greet Elder Kyoto.

  This time he waited until she reached the top of the stair.

  Like the hoary joke about the flat‑Earther arguing with the geologist, it was speeches, speeches, speeches all the way down. Vincent had spent three months on Kaiwo Maru,which Michelangelo slept away in cryo, studying the sparse information they had on New Amazonia–fragments sourced from long‑term agents on the ground, like Michelangelo’s contact, Miss Ougadougou–and reinforcing chipped and hypnagogic language lessons with live study, for which there was no effective replacement. New Amazonia’s patois was as unique as Ur’s. And Vincent didn’t have the easy, playful facility with languages that Angelo went to such lengths to conceal.

  But it had given him an opportunity to work on his own speech. On a Coalition world, he’d have been confident that most people would hear nothing but a few carefully selected sound bites, if the adaptive algorithms in their watches let that much get through the filters. An infotainment system that could determine when the user was bored or not paying attention–and later, efficiently filter out similarly boring content–was handy. But sometimes limiting.

  New Amazonia was different. As on Ur, politics was the subject of a good deal of social and personal focus, and the repatriation ceremony would hold the planet’s eyes.

  Vincent waited and listened while Claude Singapore welcomed him and Michelangelo and their precious cargo to Penthesilea. Her own speech had been surprisingly short and to the point, and when she turned to introduce him, he paused a moment to admire her grasp of rhetoric before rising and stepping out of the shade of the canopy.

  He barely resisted the urge to adjust his chemistry as he stepped up to the lectern, Michelangelo at his side as faithful and silent as any politician’s wife. Sunlight pushed his shoulders down. Like the rest of the speakers, he wasn’t wearing a hat, and the heat seeping through his wardrobe scorched and prickled burned shoulders. He touched the pad on the lectern and said “active” to key the public address system to his voice. He lifted his eyebrows at Michelangelo; all he needed to do. Angelo knew. Vincent’s focus would be on reading and working the crowd from here on in, shaping their energy and giving it back to them, flavored with what he wanted them to think. Judgment, safety, discretion–those had just become Michelangelo’s job.

  Vincent took a breath, squared his shoulders, and drew the crowd’s energy around him like a veil.

  Audiences were like perfume. Every one a little bit different, but with practice, you could identify the notes. He read this group as expectant, curious, unfriendly. Neither Vincent Katherinessen nor the Coalition was welcome here.

  Giving Vincent a mere cable bridge to balance. Because he didn’t care to rehabilitate the Coalition in their eyes. But Vincentneeded to retain their respect.

  And he wasn’t about to address the citizens.

  “People of New Amazonia,” he began, raising his voice and pitching it so the audio motes would recognize it and amplify it across the crowd. “I stand before you today in hope–”

  It was as far as he got. Michelangelo shouted “Shooter!”and Vincent, as he was conditioned to do, went limp.

  The next sensation should have been a blow, the impact of Angelo’s body taking him down, covering him.

  But it didn’t happen quite that way.

  Certain things happened when Michelangelo saw the gun come up, and all of them happened fast enough that if later asked, he would have been unable to provide their sequence. He registered the weapon before it was sighted in, shouted a warning, pointed, and dove for Claude Singapore. A split‑second judgment, based on the realization that the weapon was tending toward her, that Vincent’s wardrobe would afford him protection, and that Vincent had partial cover behind the lectern.

  Shafaqat Delhi was half a step behind him, and she landed atop Vincent, who had recovered from his surprise enough to dive with her to the floor of the stage and land facedown, arms around his head. Michelangelo lost sight of him then; he felt the shock and smelled the snapof ozone as something struck his wardrobe and he struck Elder Singapore.

  A second gunshot cracked, louder and longer–two fired at once?–and Michelangelo’s skin jumped away from transmitted pressure as his wardrobe caught that one, too. Shouting echoed around the square: more gunfire, now. Not surprising, when most of the crowd was armed, but it seemed fairly restrained, and no more bullets were arching over the stage.

  And the prime minister was shoving at his chest and cursing him as his wardrobe snapped painful sparks at her. “Stay down,” he hissed. He slapped the cutoff on his watch so it wouldn’t electrocute her, and caught her hand as she was reaching for her weapon. “Let security handle it.”

  By the time he dared to lift his head and let her lift hers, they had. Elder Singapore shoved him away violently and sat. “You’ll hear about that,” she snapped.

  He permitted it only because they were behind a screen of security agents, and–to be honest–he wanted to get to Vincent, who was making much less fuss about an equally rough takedown.

  Two bullets hung beside Kusanagi‑Jones, trapped in the aura of his wardrobe like hovering bees. He dialed a glove and plucked them out of the fog.

  Shafaqat already had a transparent baggie ready, and she took the bullets–pristine, despite having been stopped by the antishock features of the wardrobe fog–and made them vanish without so much as catching Kusanagi‑Jones’s eye. He could get to like that woman.

  “Vincent.” He crouched as Vincent pushed to his knees.

  “Unharmed,” Vincent answered, despite the evidence of a scratch across his cheek and a bloody nose. “Good work.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones smiled in spite of himself, standing. People in the square were shouting, shoving. Something shattered against the stage, and Vincent ducked reflexively. “All I did was yell. Local security swarmed the shooters. Let’s get you off the stage, Vincent. They’re not pleased about the security–”

  “Hell, no,” Vincent answered, wincing again–this time, Kusanagi‑Jones thought, from the pain of moving in his own stiff, burned skin. His hand, fever‑warm, slid into Kusanagi‑Jones’s, and he levered himself up. “I have a speech to give.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones, watching Vincent shove ineffectually at his braids and mop blood onto his hand as something else was hurled and broke, bit his own lip hard to stop his eyes from stinging.

  Because now he knew what he was going to do.

  15

  IT WAS FORTUNATE THAT VINCENT HAD PRACTICED HIS speech until it was as automatic to his recall as his system number, because later, he couldn’t remembe
r having recited a word of it. He knew he extemporized the introduction, and if it hadn’t been recorded he never would have known what he said. He must have made quite an impression with the blood caking his face and the split lip, clinging to the edges of the lectern like a drunk in an effort to keep the weight off his knee. His wardrobe provided a brace, but that hadn’t helped absorb the impact when he went down.

  At first, the crowd had been restive, muttering, rustling like a colony of insects with passed whispers. More security agents arrived while Vincent was speaking, filtering through the audience, but they didn’t reassure him as much as Michelangelo’s silent warmth at his elbow. Or the way the crowd calmed as he spoke, subsiding like whitecaps after a passing storm.

  When he stepped back from the lectern, he had silence. A long moment of it, respectful, considering. And then first snapping, scattered as the first kernels of corn popping, and then stamping feet and shouts–some approval, some approbation, he thought, but nothing else shattered on the stage.

  He waved and nodded. Lesa was on his right side, also waving, and her left hand threaded through his arm as she tugged him back. Michelangelo was right there, too, covering Vincent with his body, as Saide Austin stepped forward.

  “Like to see her match that,” Angelo murmured.

  “I did okay?”

  Angelo touched him carelessly. “Real good.”

  “Good,” Vincent said, aware that he sounded petulant, and not caring. He was seeing stars now–literally, sparkles in front of his eyes–as the adrenaline wore off. “My nose hurts.”

  “And your back?” Lesa asked.

  “My back,” he said, with tight dignity, “hurts more.”

  Vincent looked gray, the blood draining from his face as he sat stiffly upright on the chair, his leg stretched out before him to ease the knee. Kusanagi‑Jones slipped his hand across the gap between chairs and took Vincent’s, squeezing, hiding the action with their bodies. Vincent sighed and softened a little, his shoulders falling away from his neck, though he had the sense not to lean back. Shafaqat handed Vincent a wet towel while Elder Austin was still talking. He took it right‑handed, and didn’t release Kusanagi‑Jones’s hand with his left while he dabbed at the crusted blood on his lip. “At least my nose isn’t broken.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones widened his eyes and spoke in an undertone. “It’s supposed to look like that?”

  “The Christ, don’t make me laugh.” He winced, and then flinched, as if the act of wincing hurt.

  Vincent handed the bloody cloth back to Shafaqat and glanced at his watch, and Kusanagi‑Jones knew he was thinking about upping his chemistry and dismissing the idea. He was still idly checking readouts when Austin’s speech came to an end, a study in deceptive inattention, but when he glanced up, his eyes were sparkling. They stood when everybody else did, herded by security agents, and filed down the steps and through the crowd again. Kusanagi‑Jones covered Vincent as much as possible, varying distance and pace within the crowd, and for the first time was actively angry that all of the New Amazonian security was female and that Vincent was taller than any of them and all the New Amazonian dignitaries. And, of course, taller than Kusanagi‑Jones. There was nothing to block a head shot, if there was another shooter somewhere in the crowd.

  Which meant relying on the agents assigned to crowd coverage and Vincent’s wardrobe to get them through safely. And Kusanagi‑Jones thought that just possibly, he would rather have severed his own fingers with a pair of tin snips than made that endless, light‑drenched walk. Though the crowd was calm, respectful, their attention oppressed Kusanagi‑Jones like the weight of meters of water, cramping his breathing.

  He managed a free breath when they stepped out of the square and into the cool shade of the gallery lobby. A brief bottleneck ensued as politicians pulled off shoes and hung them on the racks, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Only the dignitaries, security, chosen observers, and a small herd of media would travel past this point.

  When he looked up, Kusanagi‑Jones found himself on the periphery of a glance exchanged between Elder Kyoto and Vincent that Kusanagi‑Jones would have needed all of Vincent’s skill to interpret. Lesa caught it, too, and by her frown she understood it far better than Kusanagi‑Jones–but she said nothing.

  Now that he had a plan, the wait was nauseating. He knew how Vincent, having formulated his strategy, would be behaving in Kusanagi‑Jones’s shoes. He would already have assessed the possible ways in which the subject might react, and he’d have a contingency for each. He’d have alternates mapped and a decision tree in place to deal with them, with counterplans in the event of failure or unexpected consequences.

  Kusanagi‑Jones had only one idea, and it involved doing something he hadn’t willingly done in his adult life. And he was basing it not on facts, probabilities, and meticulously calculated options, but on three entirely illogical factors.

  The first of these was Kii. Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t know what to do about the Dragon’s ultimatum. He was as torn as Hamlet; Kusanagi‑Jones did not, in all impartiality, consider himself capable of making the demanded choice. He wasn’t a decision maker. He would do anything possible to avoid being placed in that position of responsibility.

  It was a strength in some ways. One of the things that made him an accomplished Advocate was his ability to argue both sides of a predicament to exhaustion. But he’d been able to rely first on Vincent to make the tough calls, and then, after Vincent, on the fact that he was limited by scandal to unimportant missions to prevent it from becoming a weakness. It was Vincent’s job to decide, and Kusanagi‑Jones’s job to back Vincent up.

  Except when he was betraying him over politics, but that, while ironic, was orthogonal to the argument.

  The second factor was Vincent himself. Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t face stepping away from him again. He’d done it once, ignorant of the cost, as the price of something he had thought more important than either of them. He stillthought it was more important. But he wasn’t sure he would live through it twice.

  And yes, it would mean his life if Vincent reported him. He had no illusions. Except, perhaps, for the illusion that Vincent wouldn’t do it. Vincent’s loyalty to the job had always been unimpeachable…but Kusanagi‑Jones was about to gamble that his loyalty to the partnership would outweigh it.

  In the final analysis–to dignify his gut belief with an entirely unjustified word–he didn’t believe Vincent would kill him. Which led to the third factor. Which was what Vincent had said to him in bed, regarding Skidbladnir,that had flexed Kusanagi‑Jones’s shoulders and neck in a shivering paroxysm. But it was possible–just–that Vincent had done it on purpose, had chosen his moment and found a way of letting Kusanagi‑Jones know he suspected, without allowing it to become an accusation or an admission of retroactive complicity. More, it was possible that Vincent was letting him know that Vincent was about something equally dodgy himself, and wanted his help. It was a daydream. Denial. Fantasy that didn’t want to deal with the reality of how compromised he truly was. But like pearls seeded in oysters, great treasons from small irritations grow.

  He couldn’t mount a better option. Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones, Liar, was going to have to tell someone the truth. And now that he’d decided, the wait was killing him.

  As they broke into groups for the lifts, Kusanagi‑Jones caught Vincent’s eye and gave him the subtlest of smiles, nothing more than a crinkle of the corners of his eyes. Vincent returned it, careful of his bruises, and Kusanagi‑Jones swallowed a forlorn sigh.

  It was going to be a long, long day.

  He repeated those words like a silent mantra all through Elder Singapore’s and Elder Austin’s second round of speeches, these taking place against the unpolished back of the black granite panel that blocked the view of the rest of the display from casual eyes, and continued it as Vincent stepped up to the focal point. He didn’t need his mind engaged to run security. After fifty years, his reflexes and trai
ned awareness did a better job of it if he kept his consciousness out of the way.

  His thoughts still chased an endless, anxiety‑producing spiral when Vincent joined Elder Austin and Miss Ouagadougou to lead the group around to the polished, graven side of the wall. Kusanagi‑Jones insinuated himself at Vincent’s side, and so he was one of the first around the corner to observe–

  –an empty space in the middle of the gallery floor.

  Phoenix Abased,all four and a half metric tons of her, was gone.

  What followed was more or less predictable. Elder Kyoto took charge of the scene, and Vincent found Lesa hustling himself and Michelangelo to a car, passing through a crowd of insistent media with very little pause for politeness. For a moment, Vincent thought one of them might reach for her weapon, but Lesa fixed the woman with a calm, humorless stare that seemed to persuade her of the better part of valor, and then slid into the backseat opposite Vincent and Angelo.

  The door sealed and Lesa slumped. “Miss Katherinessen. You certainly know how to keep a party interesting.”

  “Surely you don’t think I–” Vincent fell silent at the wave of her hand. A few minutes passed, silence interrupted only by the blaring of the groundcar’s horn as it edged through streets jammed with Carnival revelers.

  “You haven’t the means,” she said. “It had to be somebody with override priority on House.”

  “Override?…”

  Her eyebrow rose. He fell silent. Sticky leather trapped the heat of his burned skin against his body, and he shifted uncomfortably. Angelo’s regard pressed the side of his face like a hand. Angelo, of course, had been in that gallery until nearly dawn. But he hadn’t said he’d seen anybody, in particular near Phoenix Abased,and Vincent hoped he wasn’t thinking that Vincent was likely to hold him accountable for the theft.

  “Override priority?” he asked again.

  Lesa looked up from the cuticle she was worrying with her opposite nail. “House has three modes. It automatically adapts to any regular use to which it’s put. This is how most of the architecture develops. It will also do small things–forming a fresher in an unused space or rearranging the furniture–for anybody who spends a fair amount of time in a particular spot, and provide other favors such as directions or a drinking fountain”–she tilted her head at Vincent–“for anyone, anywhere.”