Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  He’d accomplished everything he’d come here to do–the real reasons, not the surface justifications. He’d met his mother’s opposite number, deemed her honest, established a secure line of communication, exchanged the necessary codes.

  Now all he had to do was wrap up two kidnappings, a sabotage operation, a first‑contact situation, a duel to the death, convince Michelangelo he didn’t want to play kamikaze, and figure out exactly how he was going to get rid of the Governors andprotect Ur and New Amazonia from the imperial ambitions of the Coalition. Oh, yes, and at least give his ostensible task–that of reaching some sort of dйtente with whoever was in charge of the New Amazonian government by the end of the week–enough of a lick and a promise that he could justify declaring the mission accomplished and heading home. Or, potentially, blow it so badly that he and Angelo were both discharged in disgrace, which would save him the additional delicate operation of prying Michelangelo loose from the OECC.

  Because Michelangelo wascoming home with him.

  Just as soon as Vincent reclaimed him.

  Piece of cake.

  He closed the documents and stood in the darkness, running fingertips along the slick leaves and soft petals garlanding the lattice. A flicker of movement in his fisheye alerted him to company, and he turned his head, but it wasn’t Elena or any of her servants. Instead, a child stood framed in the doorway, pressed close to one of the posts as if he thought he could meld into them. A boy child, nine or ten Old Earth years, six or seven New Amazonian.

  Lesa’s son, the one she so desperately wanted to be gentle.

  “Hello,” Vincent said.

  “Hello,” the boy answered. He came forward a few more steps, from the lighted hallway to the darkness of the porch. “Are you really a diplomat?”

  Vincent smiled. The boy–Julian–was hesitant and calm, but the lilt in his voice said he was curious. And Lesa thought he was a genius, and wasted on New Amazonia.

  She might even be right.

  In any case, if Vincent was likely to wind up smuggling the kid home in his suitcase, he might as well get to know him. “I am, among other things. Your mother’s very proud of you.”

  The child sidled along the wall sideways, back to the house but meeting Vincent’s eyes defiantly. “She says if I want to be a mathematician I have to be like you.”

  “Like me?”

  Julian nodded, his hands linking behind him, shoulders squeezing back as he crowded against the wall. “Gentle. Otherwise I’ll be sent to foster and train soon, and then I’ll go to the Trials and be chosen by another house.”

  “And you won’t have time for mathematics then?” As Vincent understood it, not everybody was as…permissive…with their stud males as Pretoria house. His heart skipped painfully while he waited for the answer. Poor kid.

  “Mother says,” Julian said, tilting his head back as he recalled her words, “that women don’t like males who seem too smart. They find them threatening.”

  What an elegant little parrot she’s created,Vincent thought, and wanted to bury his face in his hands.

  “So she says I can only play with computers and numbers when I grow up if I’m gentle,” Julian continued, still childlike enough to take his silence for rapt attention. “Like you. So I must be gentle…”

  “Because you love numbers so much.”

  Julian nodded. “But it’s not bad, being like you, right?”

  Vincent found the edge of Elena’s wicker chair, sat down on it, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. The cosmic irony of the moment didn’t elude him. This child was no more a budding homosexual than Michelangelo was thick‑headed, and Vincent had to fold his hands together to keep them from shaking as he thought about Julian embarking on a life of sexual deception so he’d have an option of careers. “No,” he said. “People can be cruel. But being like me isn’t bad. I had to lie about it for a very long time, though, and pretend to be something I wasn’t to keep my job.”

  The boy’s eyes were wide. “I thought you were a diplomat because you’re, you know, because you don’t fight.”

  It cost Vincent a painful effort to keep the smile off his face. The last thing this fumbling child needed was to think somebody he was looking to as a role model found him amusing. “Things are different on Old Earth,” he said. “Gentle males are…stigmatized. Do you know that word?”

  “The stud males run everything and don’t like gentle ones.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like the other boys make fun of me for playing with numbers.”

  “Yes.”

  “How come?” An earnest question, not plaintive, as Julian’s hands fell to his sides as he forgot himself enough to step away from the wall.

  It deserved an honest answer. “I don’t know.” Which was as honest as he could be. “Your mother says you’re very talented.”

  The boy’s skin was dark, darker than Lesa’s if not as dark as Robert’s. In a better light, Vincent wouldn’t have been able to see him blush. “She said that?”

  “She did. She asked me if I would sort of be a mentor for you.” Not too much of a stretch, and Vincent didn’t feel bad about it. The child’s mother and father were missing, his sister was under arrest, and if he felt alone and frightened, he didn’t have to feel thatalone and frightened.

  Julian glanced over his shoulder toward the door, the sidelong look of somebody operating under a guilty conscience. “Do you know anything about programming quantum arrays?”

  “Not a thing,” Vincent admitted. “But I listen well. You can teach me.”

  He set his watch to record, and let the boy chatter on about transforms and quantifiable logic and fractal decision trees and a few thousand other things that might as well have been Swahili. No, not even. Urdu,because thanks to Michelangelo’s remarkable–and habitually concealed–gift for languages, Vincent actually spoke a fair amount of Swahili.

  In any case, Julian talked, and Vincent made encouraging noises. And before too long, he started to wonder exactly what Julian was doing wandering around the house alone in the middle of the night, when from what Vincent had seen even young males didn’t go about unescorted. Except, of course, during Carnival.

  The boy had to pause for breath eventually. “Julian,” Vincent said, “how did you get out of the Blue Rooms to come talk to me? Did somebody give you a pass?”

  Julian’s mobile mouth thinned and he shook his head jerkily. “No pass.”

  “So how?”

  Because as far as Vincent knew there was supposed to be only one route out of the harem, and it was supposed to be guarded. By Agnes, usually, who had been out of the house trying to locate any trace of Lesa and Michelangelo, and whom Elena had just summoned home to help deal with Katya.

  “Did you just walk out?”

  “My sire showed me,” Julian said, quietly. “There’s a secret stair. I’m not supposed to tell anybody.”

  Which explained how Robert had escaped. “Julian,” Vincent said, “I think you’d better go back before your grandmother catches you out of bed.”

  “But–”

  “It’s okay. I promise we’ll talk some more tomorrow.” He stood up, slouching enough to minimize his height advantage on a kid who hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, and came over to Julian, hunkering down a little to speak to him eye to eye. He put his hand on Julian’s shoulder and felt the boy shudder, as if the companionable contact was a threat.

  In his society, a sane reaction. “It’s okay,” Vincent said again. “I’ll help. Right now, we have to get your mom back, and my partner. After that–”

  Julian nodded jerkily and stepped back into the doorway. They stared at one another for a moment, and then a moment later Julian sidestepped and was gone.

  Kii is restless.

  This is not a sensation Kii is any longer accustomed to, and Kii is some time in identifying it. Restlessness is not one of the emotional routines that Kii finds useful in Kii’s work.

  Kii is somewhat disconcert
ed at first. Inspection, however, reveals the source of the emotion; it is an outflow of the Consent. The Consent wishes more information regardingKaiwo Maru and regarding the life forms that inhabit her.

  They are made things, like the khir, and like the khir, they are guardians. They are intelligent, and they are designed, but they are not people.

  There are differences. The khir serve. They guard the Consent’s endless dreamings, but these Governors, while designed to serve a purpose, serve it by ruling over theesthelich creatures who created them.

  It is an inversion.

  Perhaps the bipeds are truly alien enough to place their destiny in the hands of monsters. Or perhaps there is a miscalculation, and this is the result. Kii cannot yet be sure, and the Consent is chary of deciding on so thin a pattern.

  Kii continues to research. The Governors are an advantage to Kii’s bipeds–the local colony, that is. The bipeds Kii identifies as Kii’s pets, and which the Consent is to abet.

  The Governors advantage Kii’s bipeds because they severely curtail the growth of the nonlocal population.

  But they are a disadvantage as well. They create a population that is extremely creative and active, without the drain of substandard individuals. In other words, by ensuring that only extraordinary and accomplished individuals survive, and by skewing that population toward those most practically creative, the Governors nourish innovation. They force the Coalition outward, groping, grasping, subsuming other colony worlds.

  They are the engine that drives the expansion that Kii has informed Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones that Kii will not permit in local space‑time.

  The Consent is temporary. The potentialities are complex, the patterns not yet emergent. The current solution is to prepare for three eventualities deemed likely. The first requires no action, as there are possibilities in motion that carry the Coalition away from local space‑time for the foreseeable potentialities. The second is the need to eradicate the Governors as a species, which will alleviate immediate population pressure on the Coalition worlds and thus the immediate threat to the local colony. This solution carries an attendant ecological cost and an eventual pattern that may mean dealing with stronger and larger Coalition feelers. The third is to prepare to exterminate as much of the nonlocal population of bipeds as is deemed necessary to prevent their encroachment, if the emerging pattern proves them belligerent.

  When the waves collapse, Kii will be glad to no longer worry. But they are not yet resolved, and so Kiiis worried, and the Consent is not open to Kii’s advice.

  Kii believes that a preemptive strike would be more effective.Kaiwo Maru is the nexus of probabilities, the center of the indeterminacies. IfKaiwo Maru is destroyed, so many waves collapse–

  Kii is overruled. The Consent is that there are too manyesthelich intelligences aboardKaiwo Maru in addition to the Governors, and theesthelich do not act yet in belligerence. The Consent is to observe and prepare.

  The Consent takes hold, and Kii ceases to recall why Kii, in an alternately collapsed wave, would have felt differently.

  When Elena returned in the growing light of morning, Vincent’s fisheye showed that she’d been crying. He hadn’t resumed her chair after Julian left, and instead stood in the shadows near the lattice, watching things like moths and probably named for them come and go among the dead, plucked flowers, ignoring what threads of music and laughter drifted in from the streets. They were jangling, frantic sounds. Have fun quick, before someone comes and stops you.

  “You don’t like the garland,” Elena said, when he realized she was waiting for him to notice her, and turned. Her voice rasped. She coughed and rubbed her mouth with her hand.

  “They’re dead. It strikes me as macabre to hang murdered plants all over your buildings. How much longer is Carnival?”

  “Seven days,” she said. “Ten all together. And the flowers are dead because nothing grows in a Dragon city. Except carpetplant. They do their own weeding.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “That’s how the cities survived intact.” She came closer and joined him at the lattice, peering through the blooms to the empty courtyard. “Katya’s not talking,” she said. “We’re going to have to go to Claude.”

  “Not an option,” he said, and bit his lip. “I didn’t mean to say that. Some sneaky, underhanded diplomat I am.”

  She didn’t step closer, but he felt her warmth against his arm. It reminded him that his shoulders itched, and he tightened his fingers on the ledge of the porch railing.

  “You’re more worried about him than you pretend.”

  He looked at her standing there, open‑eyed, empty‑palmed, and for a moment almost managed to think of her as human.

  “We need to involve security and the militia,” she continued when it became apparent he had nothing to say. “I can’t do that without Claude.”

  “Elder Kyoto is on our side.”

  “Elder Kyoto wouldn’t keep her job long enough to be of any use to us if she tried to sneak this past the administration. Why are you so opposed to involving them?”

  “Other than her challenging Angelo to a duel?”

  “Political maneuvering,” Elena said with a wave of her hand. “There’s more.”

  “All right,” Vincent said, and let his hands fall open, too. “I believe she and Saide Austin are aware of–no, in collusion with–the operators of an illegal genetics lab somewhere on New Amazonia. And that they used that lab to create a retrovirus with which they then infected my partner, with the intent of spreading a deadly epidemic across Old Earth.”

  “You have proof?” Elena asked, as of course she would.

  “It’s in Angelo’s bloodstream,” Vincent answered. “We hadn’t had time to get it taken care of yet.”

  “Oh.” She took a half‑step forward, belly against the railing, her hands curled hard on the edge.

  “Yeah,” Vincent said. “I’m not sure talking to Claude is the best possible solution.”

  “No,” Elena said. “The genetic engineering, though. If we could prove that, we wouldn’t even have to have her killed.”

  “So all we have to do is find a genetic lab so well hidden nobody in Penthesilea knows where it is.”

  “You’ve never had to find an illegal drug lab?” Elena said. “Somebody always knows. I just wish Lesa were here.”

  “Out of danger?”

  “To help find it. Security directorate is what she does.”

  21

  LESA KNEW HER WAY THROUGH THE BUSH. UNARMED, barefoot, injured, and clad in the rags of city clothes, she managed to stay ahead of the pursuit for almost twelve hours, through the afternoon rain and well into the evening of the long New Amazonian day, until the sounds of voices faded and the only man‑made sound she heard was the occasional distant, echoing signal by gunfire, followed by a crescendo of animal complaint.

  She regretted not having a bush knife most of all. A gun would have been nice, and it chafed not to have her honor at her hip, but a knife would have made travel infinitely easier. It also would have left a defined trail, of course, but crawling under still more thorny wire‑plant, her scratched hands and forearms swelling with infection, she didn’t think she’d care. At least the tender redness was likely just her own skin flora; most New Amazonian bacteria didn’t like the taste of Earth meat any better than did the New Amazonian bugs.

  Once the sun was up, she had managed a good bearing, though that wasn’t much use without a reference point. Then, for lack of options, she had headed east. If the Right Hand hadn’t brought her too far from Penthesilea, she’d find a coast in that direction. And if they’d transported her any distance–well, this looked like home jungle, and if it wasn’t, something was very likely to eat her before she starved.

  Unlike the “insects” and the “bacteria,” some of the larger New Amazonian life had absolutely no objection to the taste of mammal. And fexa were quite territorial.

  In any case, it was bound to be
a long walk.

  At least she could entertain herself as she picked her way over borer‑addled trunks and through drapes of waterlogged vines by trying to decide how she was going to explain to Vincent that she’d left Kusanagi‑Jones behind.

  The conscious edge of her brain wasn’t helping her anyway. What she needed was the inner animal, the instincts tuned to shifts of light and the cries of big‑eyed, ringtailed treekats awakening for the night and the black‑and‑violet, four‑winged Francisco’s macaws settling down in their roosts. She thought about fashioning weapons, but that would take time, and her advantage right now was in staying ahead of her pursuers–well‑armed men who knew the lay of the land.

  She did pick up a stout branch, green and springy. It had a gnawed, pointed gnarl at the base where it had been disarticulated by a treekat after the infestation of bugs in the heartwood. The smaller twigs had withered since it fell, but only a few rootlets protruded; she stripped them away, broke the slender end off, and found herself possessed of a serviceable three‑foot‑long club.

  The rich scent of loam rose from under her denting footsteps, and insectoids scurried from overturned litter. She made an effort to walk more lightly, picking past clumps of moss that would show her footsteps, hopping between patches of wild carpetplant that flourished where sunlight managed to pierce the canopy in long, flickering rays. It wouldn’t bruise, even when she jumped on it, and it beat sticking to game trails. Those would lead pursuit right to her.

  She needed to find a place to bed down for the night.

  Lesa had slept rough before, but she had no illusions about her odds of surviving a night in the jungle unarmed, without shelter, and without daring to build a fire even if she had the wherewithal to do so. It might keep off animals, but it would be as good as a beacon to the Right Hand.

  At least being dive‑bombed and picked clean by sirens or strangled by a fexa would be quick.

  She found a crevice under a fallen log big enough to cram herself into, heaped leaf litter under it to conserve warmth, and hauled a drape of living wire‑plant over the top to serve as a barricade to any wandering animals, savaging her hands further in the process. She picked the thorns out of her palms with her teeth, and dropped them in the cup of a rain‑collecting plant among wriggling tadpoles so the water could help hide the scent of her blood.