Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  With Katya swaying behind him, he crossed to the door and tapped it open. As he’d predicted, Agnes waited there, arms crossed, chin tilted belligerently when he stepped into the corridor.

  “Would you get us a drink?” he asked. “Something sugary. Fruit juice. With a stimulant in it.”

  She nodded and turned away. He waited just outside the door until she came back, two cups in her hand. He took only one of them, smiled, and stepped back into the small chamber that had become an interrogation room.

  Katya, miraculously, was still on her stool. He set the cup down on the table, out of her reach, and stood between her and it. “Come on, Katya,” he said, quietly. “Help me out here.”

  She lifted her eyes, focused on his face. Another crack in the armor. His heart rate picked up. Sometimes, when they broke, it happened all at once. Like pebbles rolling down a hill. “I want to sleep,” she said, more distinctly than he would have thought she could manage.

  “Me, too.” He reached around behind him, picked up the mug, took a sip of the juice. It was cold and sweet, with bits of pulp that burst on his tongue when he swallowed. By an act of will, he managed not to drain it.

  Katya watched what he was doing, and couldn’t stop herself from licking her lips. She wouldn’t beg, though.

  He came to her, put his hip against her shoulder, and with one hand encouraged her to lean back against him. He brushed her hair, stroked it gently, smoothed the tangled strands. “Talk to me, sweetie,” he said. “We both want to sleep. You can end this, you know, anytime.”

  “Can’t,” she said. Her hair was dirty; the greasy strands coiled between his fingers when she shook her head. She probably would have fallen over again if he hadn’t braced her.

  His fingers wanted to tighten in frustration, but hurting her wouldn’t net him anything. “Not can’t,” he said. “Won’t. I can save her, Katya, but you have to let me.”

  She leaned her head against his belly, and he stroked her hair and held the cup to her mouth so she could drink. Her manacled hands cupped around his, and she drank in long, lingering swallows, licking the edge of the empty cup before she’d let him take it away.

  The sugar and stimulants worked fast. He felt her stabilizing before he finished reaching over her to set the empty cup down. She shifted on the stool, but didn’t fall or pull away. Instead, she leaned her head against his stomach, closed her eyes, and sighed.

  He didn’t say anything, just kept stroking her hair. Gently, impersonally, as he would stroke a child’s hair. She was relaxing, slowly.

  People were surprisingly easy to tame, when you knew how to go about it. A little kindness at an unexpected moment could create a bond. An interrogation was a relationship, and relationships were based on developing trust. All seductions worked the same way; the seducer must create empathy with his target. He must project himself into the target’s emotional space and create a connection. Such connections were only effective when they ran both ways.

  Vincent couldn’t remember if this had ever bothered him.

  “Would you like another drink?”

  “Please.” She hesitated. “Could I use the toilet, please?”

  She hadn’t been so polite thirty hours ago. “In a moment,” he said, and steadied her with one hand before he stepped away. He made sure to collect the empty cup before going to the door. It was light and rounded, shatterproof, not much of a weapon–but any weapon was better than none.

  He’d once seen a man killed with an antique paper fan. It was the sort of experience that stayed with a person.

  He exchanged the empty cup for the full, ignoring Agnes’s glower, and returned. Katya’s eyes were closed. This moment of clarity would be brief, and before long she’d crash harder than ever. Borrowed energy would be repaid with interest.

  He held the cup for her again, and again her hands came up to cover and control his, the ceramic of her manacles warm against his wrist. She drank half, paused, and drank again, licking her lips when he took the empty cup away. “Do you really think she’s in danger?”

  Vincent turned and put his backside on the edge of the table. He folded his arms over his chest and waited, letting his silence be his answer.

  “You’re really worried.” Her voice still had that vague, frail note, more strained now though the hoarseness had faded.

  “I’m scared stiff.” He made it into a confidence, leaning forward over his folded arms. “And I do want to help. Your mother, and Robert. And my partner.”

  She bit her lip. He crossed his ankles and waited, insouciant though it was everything he could do not to jitter against the table edge.

  “Whatever they told you, there will be bloodshed,” he said.

  “Claude’s going to sell us out to you. To the Coalition.”

  “Claude’s your best hope of keeping the Coalition out,” he said. All Kii’s confidence aside, Vincent wasn’t certain that the Dragons could handle the combined might of the Governors and the OECC. “Claude, or your grandmother. If the people you’re working for succeed in overthrowing the government, who do you think will be here to pick up the pieces? A civil war is exactly what they would want.”

  “What you would want, you mean. I don’t think so.” She still wasn’t thinking well. It was evident in her squint, in the pauses between her words. “If the Coalition wanted a, a change of government, you wouldn’t be arguing against it.”

  He sighed and straightened, came to her, and smoothed her filthy hair again. “Sweetheart, I don’t work for the Coalition.”

  Her eyes were closed. She was listening.

  “I work with your mother,” he continued. “And I agree with you, things have got to change on New Amazonia. But wiping each other out for the convenience of the Governors is not the way. Trust me on this, as one born on a repatriated world.”

  She pressed her face into his wardrobe.

  “Get me a map,” she said. “And a pot of coffee.”

  Vincent craved a shower, long and hot and decadent and New Amazonian. Anything to wash the deceit off his skin. Instead, he bent down and kissed her on top of the head. Agnes was already on the way in with a datapad in her hand when, silently, her shoulders shaking, Katya started to cry.

  When Kusanagi‑Jones found Lesa, he judged by the drag marks that she had hauled herself at least fifty meters after disentangling herself from the thorns. The sun was high, the air breathless and heavy under the great arched trees, but the afternoon had not yet dimmed with the clouds that might bring rain, and Kusanagi‑Jones had not heard thunder. Lesa lay curled among the arched roots of some smooth‑boled, gray‑skinned tree, her hands locked over her face, her back wedged into a crevice more of a size for a child.

  Kusanagi‑Jones could smell the blood from two meters off. He couldn’t see her breathing. And he was panting hard enough that he couldn’t have heard her.

  His knees ached, his calves were shaking, his heart pounding hard enough that he saw its rhythm in his trembling hands. His feet were chafed raw and blistered in the boots, the borrowed socks soaked to uselessness with sweat and serosanguinous fluid. He’d run the fifteen kilometers.

  He wasn’t as young as he had been.

  Time to get out of the field,he thought, and considered for a moment the serious possibility that he might be suffering a myocardial infarction. But the hammering pulse, the stabbing pain across his chest, and the dark edges around his vision faded rather than worsening, and he managed to stumble close enough to go down on one knee beside Lesa, even as he didn’t quite manage to avoid thinking of her as the body.

  And now, finally, he heard thunder and a distant pattering like dry rice shaken in a container that might be the sound of leaves brushed aside by rain. The jungle was big and disorienting, full of things to trip over and ground too soft to run on without twisting your ankle, the trees teeming with flickering animals, black birds with feathered hind‑limbs that they used like a second pair of wings and screaming green‑feathered lemurs with bright, blink
ing eyes.

  Too late,he told himself as he gathered himself to touch her, bracing for disappointment, taking in the seeping, swollen lumps of her feet, the glossiness of the infected scratches on her hands. He could kill without hesitation, but it took him seconds to gather the courage to reach out and push her matted hair away from her face.

  Warm.

  Of course, she would be. The air was hotter than his skin. She didn’t stir, and he reached to brush her hair back, to afford her whatever privacy in death he could.

  But something caught his attention and held it, and he heard himself bringing in a slow, thoughtful breath, full of the scents of blood and infection and the warm sweet yeasty smell of the moss and the fermenting earth.

  Her eyes were closed. Closed all the way, closed softly and completely, the way a dead woman’s eyes would not be.

  He grabbed her wrists and dragged her huddled body out from under the curve of the root, laying her flat on her back as rain began to patter on the leaves overhead, not penetrating the canopy at first but then pounding down, splashing his face, soaking a dead man’s shirt, washing the grime and sap and blood off the deep angry scratches on Lesa’s face.

  Kusanagi‑Jones leaned back on his heels, gathered Lesa up in his arms so the water wouldn’t pound up her nose, and tilted his own face to the warm rain, mouth open, feeling her heart beat slowly against his chest.

  She awoke fifteen minutes later, while he was dragging her into a hastily constructed shelter, rain still smacking their heads. The first thing she did when she blinked fevered eyes and saw him bent over, half carrying and half‑shoving her under a badly thatched lean‑to, was start to laugh.

  “One thing I never understood,” Lesa said, rainwater dripping down the back of her neck. “Why the Coalition is so set against gentle males–”

  “What’s not to understand?” Michelangelo might seem brusque and hardhanded, sarcastic and cold, but he touched her damaged skin with exquisite care. He’d gotten a medical kit somewhere, and a shirt he was tearing into bandages. Whatever he was doing made her feet hurt less. Which wasn’t surprising; her ankles looked like the trunks of unhealthy trees, and could hardly have hurt more.

  He had started at the soles of her feet, mummifying her from toes to ankles, and was now dabbing the red, swollen bites on her calves.

  “It’s not like you contribute to population growth,” she said, frowning. He pressed the sides of a bite, clear fluid seeping between his fingertips. “Ow!”

  “Sorry.” He smeared that wound, too, glossy leaves dimpling and catching under his knees as his weight shifted. The motion tumbled another scatter of rain down Lesa’s neck, and a few jeweled drops made minute lenses on his close‑cropped cap of hair. “No, it’s not. Not by accident, anyway.”

  “But?”

  “You’re operating on spurious assumptions, so your conclusions are flawed.”

  “How–Ow! How so?”

  “One, that sexual preferences have anything to do with reproduction. Doesn’t matter who you fuck. Only way to have an unauthorized baby on Earth is to plan it.” His hands shook as he tucked in a stray end of bandage, and she thought, startled, that he wasn’t lying to her now.

  “Two?” she pressed, when he’d been silent a little longer.

  “Human societies aren’t logical. Yours isn’t. Mine isn’t. Vincent–” He coughed, or laughed, and shook dripping water out of his hair. “–well, his is at least humane in its illogicality.”

  “So why?”

  “You want my theory? Worth what you pay for it.”

  She nodded. He looked away.

  “Cultural hegemony is based on conformity,” he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. “Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions–or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them.” He shrugged roughly into her silence. “I’m one of them.”

  “But you worked for…‘us.’”

  “In appearance.” He reached for another strip of cloth.

  It was damp, but so was everything. She shivered when he laid it over seeping flesh. “How long have you been a double?”

  The slow smile he turned on her when he looked up from the work of bandaging her legs might, she thought, be the first honest expression she’d ever seen cross his face. He let it linger on her for a moment, then glanced down again.

  “I can tell you one way your society does make sense,” Lesa said. “The reason Old Earth women don’t work.”

  “And New Amazonian men? But some do. Not everyone can afford the luxury of staying home.”

  “Luxury? Don’t you think it’s a trap for some people?”

  “Like Julian?” Harshly, though his hands stayed considerate.

  She winced. “Yes.”

  The silence stretched while he tore cloth. She leaned against rough bark. At least her back was mostly unbitten. “During the Diaspora,” Lesa said, “there wasn’t workon Old Earth. Industry failed, demand fell, money was worth nothing. The only focus was on getting off‑planet. Then, after the Vigil, after the Second Assessment, when the population stabilized, there was an artificial surplus of stuff left over from before. The Old Earth economy relies on maintaining that labor shortage. So women’s value to society is not as professionals, but as homemakers or low‑paid labor. And then you fetishize motherhood, and tell them that they aren’t all good enough for that…”

  She trailed off, looking down to see what he was doing to her legs. More salve, more bandages. Meticulous care, up to her knees now. That was the worst of it.

  “The Governors’ engineers were mostly female,” Michelangelo said, as if to fill up her silence. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “And Vincent didn’t know about your sympathies?”

  “To Free Earth? He didn’t. Not the sort of thing you share. If I wind these, it’ll make it hard to walk.”

  “Just salve,” she decided, regretfully. The pressure of the wraps made the bites feel better. “He knows now, though.”

  “We both know. Delicious, isn’t it?”

  She’d never understand how he said that without the slightest trace of bitterness. “So you grew up gentle on Old Earth, and you became a revolutionary.”

  “Never said they were linked.”

  “I can speculate.” She touched his shoulder. His nonfunctional wardrobe couldn’t spark her hand away.

  He tucked the last tail of the bandages in, and handed her the lotion so she could dab it on the scattered bites higher on her legs, her thighs and belly and hands. He sat back, and shrugged. “It’s not common. Maybe 4 percent, baseline, and they do genetic surgery. Mostly not an issue to manage homosexual tendencies before birth. In boys. Girls are trickier.”

  His tone made her flinch.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “No,” she said. “Just…genetic surgery. You’re so casual.”

  “As casual as you are about eating animals?”

  It wasn’t a comment she could answer. “And your mom didn’t opt for the surgery?”

  “My mother,” he said, sitting back on his heels as the imperturbable wall slid closed again, “planned an unauthorized pregnancy. And concealed it. I wasn’t diagnosed prenatally. And I don’t think anybody expected me to make it to majority without being Assessed.”

  “And you weren’t.”

  “No,” he said, quietly. “She was.”

  This time, when he touched her ankle, she shivered. But not because of him. She covered his hand with her own, leaning forward to do it, breaking open the crusted cuts on her palm and not caring. “I’m glad you weren’t,” she said. And then she leaned back against the smooth gray aerial root of the big rubbermaid tree that
formed the beam and one wall of the lean‑to, and slowly, definitely, closed her eyes.

  23

  VINCENT COULD SEE NOTHING FROM THE AIR, BUT THAT failed to surprise him. He perched on the observer’s seat of the aircar, beside the pilot, and made sure his wardrobe was active and primed. The Penthesileans wouldn’t give him a weapon, but as long as he had his wits, he wasn’t helpless.

  A weaponized utility fog didn’t hurt either.

  “They must have a camouflage screen up,” he said over his shoulder.

  Elena, in the backseat, grunted as the aircar circled. “Or Katya lied to us.”

  “Also possible,” Vincent admitted, as the pilot reported finding nothing on infrared. “I don’t suppose any of these vehicles have pulse capability.”

  “This one does,” the pilot answered, after a glance to Elena for permission.

  There were seven aircars in the caravan, armored vehicles provided by Elder Kyoto through the Security Directorate. According to Katya, that should be more than enough to handle the complement of this particular Right Hand outpost.

  And again, Katya might be wrong. Or she might be decoying them into a trap, though Vincent’s own skills and instincts told him shebelieved she was telling the truth.

  Of course, he’d also trusted his own skills and instincts about Michelangelo. But Angelo was the best Liar in the business–and close enough in Vincent’s affections that any reading would be suspect anyway.

  “Take us higher, please,” Vincent said. The pilot gave him a dubious look, but when Elena didn’t intervene she shrugged and brought them up. Somewhere down there, indistinguishable from the rest of the canopy by Gorgon‑light, had to be the camouflage field. Invisible–but not unlocatable.

  Vincent’s wardrobe included licenses for dozens of useful implements, among them an echolocator. It was designed for use in situations where there was no available light and generating more would be unwise. In this case, he was obligated to patch through the aircar’s ventilation systems to externalize the tympanic membranes, but that was the work of a few moments.