Carnival

He sighed and ran his fingertips across his wrist, activating the sensors in his watch. “Not more chemistry,” Vincent said.

“Just dialing my wardrobe down,” he said. “Hate to zap the minister of produce.”

“Do they have a minister of produce?” Vincent asked, between unmoving lips. Their eyes caught, and Vincent smiled, just with the corner of his eyes.

Michelangelo looked down quickly, disguising the sudden, tight pain in his chest. There had to be a way. There hadto be a way. There was a way out of everything.

It was just a matter of finding it, and then having the guts to grab it and the strength to hang on. And standing ready to pay the cost. Kusanagi‑Jones’s choice was a little too clear cut. He could be loyal, desert Free Earth, and keep Vincent–maybe. If they could pull this off. If he could bring home the brane technology–far more critical to their reception on Earth than any alliance with New Amazonia–it might be enough to buy him Vincent. All it meant was abandoning the ideal of freedom from the Governors that he’d been working toward for thirty years.

He even saw an angle that might work. All he had to do was convince Kii to give it to him as the price of keeping the Coalition out of New Amazonia. Destroying the Consent wouldn’t work. He didn’t think the virtual space they inhabited was housed in the Kali system. Or even in the local universe.

If it were him, and he had the technology to manipulate branes, to build himself a pocket universe of his desire, he’d build one where the cosmological rules encouraged a stable existence, or maybe lock it to an event horizon. What was the point of Transcending to virtual immortality if it just meant you still had to die when entropy collected its inevitable toll?

After long consideration of the night’s odd conversation, Kusanagi‑Jones even thought he understood the theory. The technology was another issue, of course–but based on what Kii had said, that suggestive word cosmocline,and a technology apparently based on manipulation of quantum probability and superstrings, Kusanagi‑Jones could make an educated layman’s guess at what was going on.

The mysterious energy might be generated betweenuniverses, in a ma

This was a species that could grab hold of a superstring and open up a wormhole to another universe as if tugging aside a drape. Kii’s promise to obliterate the Coalition stem and branch if it threatened Kii’s pets was not idle posturing.

It was just Kusanagi‑Jones’s fortune that the Dragon was ethical and preferred to avoid atrocity. When convenient. And that he was constrained by the programmed equivalent of a neurochemical tether; he was physically (if that was the right word for a Transcended intelligence) incapable of acting against his species’ interests.

Leaving Kusangi‑Jones the choice of siding with Vincent, and leaving most of his species under the threat of Assessment and the Cabinet’s less‑than‑generous governance–or of lying to Vincent, and protecting New Amazonia from the Coalition and the Coalition from the Dragons, and losing Vincent for good.

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.