Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  Then Vincent’s half‑smile turned into a real one, as if he knew exactly what Kusanagi‑Jones was thinking, and loved him for it, or in spite of it. And Kusanagi‑Jones smiled back.

  So it went.

  Kill or be killed.

  Vincent took him by the elbow and steered him into the room. “You have the look of a woman with a plan,” Vincent said, and the corners of Lesa’s eyes crinkled, an expression that made Kusanagi‑Jones homesick.

  “Can you shield this room?” she asked.

  “Shield it from what?”

  “Electromagnetic monitoring.”

  Vincent glanced at Kusanagi‑Jones, who looked right back, silently. “Yes,” Vincent said. He touched his watch. “The whole room?”

  “It’d be more convenient. I’ve already isolated it from House.”

  “Angelo?”

  Kusanagi‑Jones nodded, and slaved his wardrobe to Vincent’s. Between them, they had enough foglets to manage a Faraday cage, since their wardrobes–given time–could manufacture more as needed.

  The process took a few minutes, and Lesa said nothing further throughout, which seemed an indication for communal silence. “There,” Vincent said when it was done. “I’ve added eavesdropping countermeasures.”

  Lesa didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at Kusanagi‑Jones and asked, “Did you download Kii’s medical program?”

  “He did,” Vincent answered.

  “Do you still have it?”

  Julian, who hadn’t spoken, came up beside Lesa, close enough to feel her body heat without the childish admission of actually touching her or stepping behind her. Kusanagi‑Jones looked at him, not at Lesa, and held up his left arm, stripping the sleeve off the forearm to show the status lights on his watch. Only one blinked green now, the slow flicker of the nanodoc condition readout. The rest glowed red or dark amber, for critical infection.

  There was more amber than there had been an hour before, and not just because Kusanagi‑Jones had grabbed a nap.

  “I need that,” Julian said.

  Kusanagi‑Jones let his arm fall, and his sleeve drop over it. “The program?”

  “A copy of it.” He shuffled forward, forgetting that he had been half hiding behind his mother, and grabbed Kusanagi‑Jones’s wrist to pull him toward the terminal.

  Bemused, Kusanagi‑Jones was about to step forward and follow, until Julian froze and turned back, gazing up at Vincent with stricken eyes.

  Vincent, sod him, was waiting for it. He smiled at Julian and waved him away, Kusanagi‑Jones included.

  Nice to know I’ve still got his mark stamped between my eyes.But he went, as Vincent must have known he would.

  “What frequency does it use?” Julian asked, and Kusanagi‑Jones told him. And then queued and transferred the archive copy of Kii’s program as soon as the protocol connected.

  “What exactly are you planning?” Vincent hadn’t done more than step sideways and lean back against the wall before the door. Kusanagi‑Jones knew without turning that his chin would be dropped insouciantly toward his chest, his ankles crossed.

  “Julian’s been working on quantum decision trees,” Lesa said.

  “Fractal,” Julian corrected, without looking up from his displays and the holographic array floating in the air before him. “Fractal decision trees.”

  “Which means what, in layman’s terms?” It almost sounded as if Vincent knew what was going on. Which was fine with Kusanagi‑Jones, because he certainly didn’t. He could code a little, hack a wardrobe license as well as anybody–which was to say, not very well at all–but whatever Julian was doing with confident, sweeping gestures of his hands over the holopad was beyond him.

  “House has its own programming language,” Lesa said. “Julian’s been learning to code for it.”

  “It uses four‑dimensional matrices,” Julian said. “You would not believe how tricky.” He looked up, and seemed to realize that Kusanagi‑Jones was still standing behind him, peering over his shoulder with a befuddled expression. “This is going to take awhile,” he said, with a child’s sublime confidence in his field of expertise. “You might as well get something to eat. I won’t have anything done before tomorrow.”

  “But what,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, folding his hands together to keep his fingers from tightening, “are you doing?”

  “Kii’s a computer program, right?” Lesa said. “I mean, he’s Transcendent. He’s a machine intelligence. So theoretically you could rewrite him–”

  “A virus,” Vincent said.

  “A worm,” Julian corrected. “Or more like…like…repurposing the worm he wrote for Miss Kusanagi‑Jones.”

  “Call me Angelo,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, unable to contemplate the specter of this infant calling him Miss anything. A week was overtime on this planet. Ten days was beyond the call of duty.

  Julian glanced sideways enough to grin. “Anyway, we’ve got a worm. I just have to, you know, tweak it.”

  “It’s not Kii,” Kusanagi‑Jones said reluctantly. It was such an arrogant, audacious plan. Exactly the sort of thing Vincent would come up with, really.

  He hated to punch holes in it.

  “What do you mean?” Lesa asked. She had sat back down on the bed, and Kusanagi‑Jones was glad. He’d seenher feet, even if she was determined not to show the pain.

  And Vincent was looking at him, too. When he’d rather hoped that Vincent would pick up the thread and do the explaining. “It’s the Consent,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. “Not a hive mind, really. But the community makes up its mind and Kii does what the Consent decides. Democracy by decree. Everybody votes, and whatever gets voted up retroactively becomes everybody’s idea. Biochemical. So when Kii says it’s not his decision, he’s not saying anything more than the truth.”

  And anyway, he didn’t care how good the New Amazonians were at programming for their adopted domicile, he didn’t believe for a second that the child could actually hack a Transcendent brain. And he didn’t think any of them wanted to live with the consequences of failure.

  Lesa stared at him, eyebrows crawling under streaked hair, and then folded her hands over her lap. “Biochemical.”

  “Yes.”

  “Except it can’t very well be biochemical if he doesn’t have any damned biology, can it?”

  “A programmed approximation of biology,” Vincent said. “The important part is he’s not an individual once the decisions have been made. He’s a happy cog, a bit of the machine.”

  Lesa nodded slowly. And then she looked at Julian. “So what do you think he’d do if we cut him off from the Consent? Isolated him? Let him…make up his own mind?”

  This time, it was Vincent’s gaze on the back of his head that turned Kusanagi‑Jones around. They traded a look, and Vincent slowly shook his head. “I get the impression he’s been edging up to the limits of his authority to help us. Julian, do you think you can do that?”

  Julian shrugged. Lesa drew one foot up onto the bed, wincing. She cleared her throat. “I toldyou he was a genius.”

  Julian, head bent over the terminal, snorted. “Mom. Please.”

  Kii listens.

  The bipeds plot. Clever, delicious bipeds, random and amusing. They are eager for change, ravenous for it, the antithesis of the Consent. The Consent are firm in their judgment, unambiguous, and Kii is in agreement. It is too dangerous to become involved with such a chaotic species, one prone to generating and collapsing wave‑states with mad abandon. The wave‑states that originate in the possibility of the Consent intervening on behalf of the bipeds are unpredictable, and some of them endanger the Consent itself.

  The possibilities that stem from noninvolvement are safer. Predictable. There is a war, and the defense of the local population of bipeds, those that the khir are fond of.

  Most of the others do not survive.

  Kaiwo Maru remains a nexus. Where she enters the local system, the potentialities propagate. Where she leaves, they collapse. One choice is safety. Th
e other–

  –unpredictable.

  There is no intervention. That is the Consent. The ac tions of the Governors and the Coalition Cabinet follow predictions to a nicety. Kii is one with the Consent in this.

  But Julian’s involvement is an emerging pattern, one not forecast. It is a new wave. And Kii is not reporting yet, for Kii has neither instruction nor Consent.

  Kii is fond of the bipeds. Kii is explorer‑caste. Kii is alien to the Consent in many ways, a valuable, diverse voice in the chorus of similar voices, an evolved risk taker, an outside perspective that exists to be heard and then ignored.

  Kii does not resent this. Kii is in agreement with the Consent. Kii will always be one with the Consent.

  But the bipeds are so interesting when they’re plotting. And Kii knows that the Consent will be to prevent their plots from coming to fruition. And once the Consent is reached, Kii will be in agreement of it. Will always have been in agreement with it.

  Kii will report it when the plotting ceases to be interesting. But Kii is explorer‑caste.

  Kii wants to listen first.

  They slept while Julian was working. It didn’t matter that it was bright afternoon, hours before siesta and the rains not even a hint of darkness on the horizon; Lesa dropped off midsentence, slumped on her bed with her feet propped on pillows, and when Vincent turned to share a grin with Michelangelo, he found his partner leaned against the wall with his head tipped back and his eyelids fluttering, hands palm‑up on his thighs.

  Just as well, Vincent thought. He was in the best shape of any of them, and he was running on ninety‑odd hours of chemistry and snatches of sleep. He told Julian to wake him if anything interesting happened, sat down next to Michelangelo and made a pillow of his shoulder, and was asleep too fast to realize exactly how uncomfortable the position actually was.

  He noticed it waking, however.

  It was dark in Lesa’s bedroom, the image of the nebula overhead banished as surely as the jungles of the walls. But there was light from the door to the balcony, and Vincent could make out Julian’s silhouette crouched beside him. Any lingering grogginess fled before the lancing pain when he lifted his head. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “It’s almost morning,” Julian said. “Agnes came at supper time, but she said not to wake you. The household’s in bed.”

  Michelangelo stirred against Vincent’s shoulder, lifting his head and wincing, too. “Done?”

  Trust Angelo to cut to the heart. “I’m not sure,” Julian said. “I might be. I’m as done as I know how–”

  “Right,” Vincent said. He checked his watch: two hours before sunrise. He’d slept across twenty‑one hours and felt like he could use another eight. Lying flat, preferably; his neck was not forgiving of an evening spent slumped against his partner and the wall.

  He scrubbed crusts from his eyes and reached over to push Michelangelo’s sleeve up, checking the status lights on his watch. They burned amber and green, and in their reflected light Angelo’s lips twitched. “Aw.”

  Vincent kicked Angelo’s ankle. “Let’s wake your mom up, Julian, and see if we can make your plan happen.”

  Even if they had been inclined to skip eating, someone must have requested that House alert the kitchen when Lesa rose, for by the time she’d emerged from the fresher with a towel wrapped around her head, Alys had arrived at the door toting a tray of coffee, toast, fruit, and preserves, along with an assortment of less appetizing things. House produced a small table and four chairs for their use and then Alys had left them alone with their breakfast.

  It wouldn’t have occurred to Vincent to feel guilty for the hour if Michelangelo hadn’t mentioned it, but despite that momentary pang of conscience his stomach thanked him for the care and the coffee–which they must grow locally, the way they went through the stuff. On Ur, it was an expensive, imported treat, but Ur was notably lacking the sort of tropical climates in which the plants thrived. In Penthesilea, you could probably grow them on rooftops, if the city had permitted it.

  Of course, on Ur, a potentially invasive alien plant would never be legally cultivated, though Vincent knew there were black‑market greenhouses. It marked another way in which New Amazonia’s government was environmentally permissive.

  Vincent, watching Lesa nurse her third cup of coffee while Angelo took his turn in the shower, noticed that she wasn’t wearing her honor, and tried not to think that today was the day of the duel.

  Lesa’d dressed in a skirt and a tunic and freshened her bandages, and though she still hobbled on crutches, Vincent thought her feet and ankles looked less swollen. He could make out the outline of bones and muscle under the tightly wrapped gauze, anyway, which he couldn’t have done yesterday.

  She seemed calm as she watched Julian pack food away, and not at all like a woman contemplating a Dragon. Or a duel.

  The human animal’s ability to acclimate to nearly anything hadn’t ceased to amaze Vincent. And confound him a little, he thought, as he poured another cup of coffee for himself. The flavor was bitter, satisfyingly rich and full‑bodied, and he cupped both hands around the cup and hooked one heel over the seat of his chair so he could rest his elbow on his knee.

  Michelangelo, clean and steaming faintly, his wardrobe arranged in a plain royal blue shirt and black trousers, came padding out of the fresher and kissed Vincent on the top of the head in a shocking display of affection. He still walked gingerly, his feet dotted with blood blisters and raw places, but even those looked better since yesterday.

  There was a kind of pleasing domesticity to this little scene–woman, child, khir catching tossed scraps of toast, uncharacteristically pleasant Michelangelo–and it amused Vincent when he caught himself thinking so. This was nice,the dim room lit by the glow of Julian’s coding display and the gray‑gold sky outside, stained along the rooftops with a peach hue that echoed the color of the tatter‑patterns on Kii’s wing leather. It was a taste of something he’d left behind on Ur, lazy rest‑day mornings with his sisters and brother and mother and both of her husbands sprawled about the atrium, quoting news stories and satire to each other. And it pained him to think of this, and that, arrayed in frail defiance against the machines of the Coalition.

  He and Angelo ranked as subtleweapons.

  When he looked up from the broken rainbows scattered across the oily surface of his coffee, Lesa was frowning at him. “You’re thinking about what happens if this doesn’t work.”

  He shrugged. She probably knew what he was thinking as well as he did. “If it doesn’t work, we fight.”

  “Assuming I beat Claude today.” She glanced guiltily at Julian–who was hunched over the terminal, getting toast crumbs in the interface–and then looked down at her hands, both curled clumsily around her coffee mug, and frowned. When she set the mug down and turned her hands up to examine the palms, the fingers stayed curled, and Vincent could see how the heat had puffed and softened her wounds, which were glossy and slick looking where she’d showered the scabs away.

  Michelangelo was full of surprises this morning. He crossed behind Vincent, trailing his fingers across his shoulder, and took the four steps to crouch down next to Lesa’s chair with something like his old grace. And then he reached out gingerly and slid thick fingers around her wrist, drawing her hand out and turning it over so he could brush a kiss across the back. Old Earth chivalry.

  “Capable hands,” he said, while Lesa stared down at him with twisted lips and a wrinkled brow. “You’ll manage.”

  His fingers flexed on her wrist, and then he replaced her hand in her lap and stood, patting her lightly on the shoulder.

  She turned to follow him with her eyes. “And if I lose?”

  “If we have to fight, we fight,” Michelangelo said, but Vincent wouldn’t let him get away with that particular lie.

  “We go home in disgrace,” he interjected. “Claude takes New Amazonia isolationist, and Dragons defend it. And Ur and New Earth do what they have to.”

/>   “And everybody gets their asses kicked except us,” Lesa said, staring at Julian’s oblivious back. Vincent tried to remember what that kind of focus felt like and couldn’t. Forty years since he might have been like that, but that was forty years of enhanced sensory input and eyes on the back of his head ago, forty years of living or dying by his wits while trying to fill five or ten mutually exclusive assignment objectives simultaneously.

  “You could just let her send us home, mission incomplete,” Michelangelo said.

  “Dishonoring myself and discrediting my mother, and leaving Claude in an even stronger position than if she shoots me.”

  “Besides,” Vincent said, “that’s an acceptable risk for me. Not for you, Angelo. Not after New Earth.”

  It hurt, the way Michelangelo’s shoulders rose and fell, the way he dismissed his own life as acceptable losses. He wasn’t expecting to live through this, Vincent realized. He didn’t think their trick with Kii would work. And he wasn’t even bothering to hide it.

  He was just telling the truth.

  It was the most plaintive admission of defeat Vincent could imagine.

  “Claude will want that art,” Lesa said, as if driven to shatter any silence so strained. “And even if Claude doesn’t, Elder Austin will. They’ll have to work something out with the Coalition eventually.”

  After the Coalition crushed whatever fragmentary revolution Katherine Lexasdaughter managed to cobble together without New Amazonia and its unrepatriated trade partners. After the…flawed New Amazonian social structure got a kick in the pants that could keep it going strong for another hundred years. There was nothing like a little outside pressure to get people to stick to a stupid philosophical position.

  The Coalition was proof enough of that.

  “Right,” Lesa said, looking down. “Let’s hope this works, then. Julian?”

  He didn’t twitch.

  “Julian?” she repeated. “Are you ready?”

  The second use of his name penetrated. His head snapped around. “I’ve been ready for hours.”