Carnival

“House, open the door, please.”

It spiraled obediently wide. This was a public space, and there was no reason for House to forbid him entrance.

The murmur of voices washed out as he stepped inside. Or a voice, anyway. Katya bent over a flat‑topped table covered with layers of folded cloth, one hand on the neck of the animal she whispered to and the other on his muzzle. It looked as if the bandages had been changed.

Girl and khir were alone in the room. Katya glanced up, tensing, at the sound of the door. Walter might have lifted his head, but she stroked his neck and restrained him, and he relaxed under her hand. She also seemed to calm when she saw Vincent, but he knew it for a pretense. Her shoulders eased and her face smoothed, but no matter how softly she petted the khir’s feathers the lingering tension in her fingers propagated minute shivers across his skin.

Vincent cleared his throat. “Just how smart is a khir?”

She smiled. “Smart.”

“As smart as a human?”

“Well,” she said, stroking Walter’s feathers back along the bony ridge at the back of his skull, “not the same kind of smart. No. They don’t use tools or talk, but they understand fairly complicated instructions and they coordinate with humans and with their pack mates.”

“So they must communicate.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Pity he can’t talk,” Vincent said, sadly.

Katya colored, olive‑tan skin pinking at the cheeks. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said, “I’m sorry about Miss Kusanagi‑Jones. I want to offer my personal assurances that I and everyone in Pretoria house will do everything we can to find him and bring him home safe. Agnes is coordinating the search now, and I’ll relieve her in the morning.”

As if her words were permission, he stepped over the threshold and came fully into the room. The white tile floor was cool, even cold, shocking to feet that had already grown accustomed to carpetplant and the blood‑warmth of House’s hallways. “I shall be praying for your mother,” he said, “and her safe and timely return.”

“Thank you,” she said after a hesitation, and licked her lips before she looked up again. “Do you pray often?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ur is a Christian colony.”

“Founded by Christians. Radicals, like New Amazonia.”

She kept her eyes on the khir, as if watching him breathe. He lay quietly, the nictitating membrane closed under outer lids at half‑mast. She smoothed his feathers again. “We’re taught that Christians were among the worst oppressors of women. On Old Earth. That they held women responsible for all the sin and wickedness in the world.”

He chuckled. “Not my branch of the Church. We’re heretics.”

“Really?” She brightened as if it were a magic word. “Like Protestants?”

He shook his head and reached out slowly to lay his hand on Walter’s flank behind the bandages. The khir’s hide was soft and supple under scales like beads on an evening gown, pebbled against his fingertips. The khir sighed as another breath of tension left his muscles. Vincent’s own heart slowed, the ache across his shoulders easing in response.

“Descended, philosophically speaking, from the very first heresy of all. One that was eradicated by the Paulines about two and a half thousand years ago, for being prone to sentiments that were thought to undermine the authority of the Church.”

He had her interest. She brushed the back of his hand and he could feel her trembling, though she restrained the appearance of it well. “But was it really a…church yet?”

“There was a bishop.” She laughed, so he continued. “Who didn’t approve of their ideas, such as that the Christ might speak to anyone and not solely through the Apostles, and that God was both masculine and feminine and thus women might serve equally as well as men, and that the passion of the Christ was a physical ordeal only, and did not affect his divine essence, and so martyrdom was kind of silly. You know, the usual heresies.”

“And you believe all that?”

He smiled and turned his hand over, pressing it to hers palm to palm. “I was raised to. My mother’s philosophy is a utilitarian one. She believes the purpose of religion, or government, is to maintain the maximum number of people in the maximum possible comfort. And so it suits her to believe that what the serpent offered Eve in the garden wasn’t sin, but self‑knowledge. Enlightenment. Gnosis.”

Katya shook her head. “That’s supposed to be the story that was used to justify oppressing women.”

“But what if the snake did her a favor?”

“Then Eve’s not the villain. Your mother’s supposed to be some kind of a prophet, isn’t she? On your home world?”

“Gnostics believe that anyone can prophesy, if the spirit moves them. She is”–he shrugged–“very good at getting people to listen to her. On Ur, and elsewhere. Enough so that even Earth has to deal with her.”

She squeezed lightly before she pulled her hand away. “Okay, you said you were raised to believe that. But you didn’t answer my question.”

He gri

When she paused and swallowed, it was all there in her expression, for far longer and much more plainly than she would have liked. How Lesa had missed it, Vincent couldn’t imagine.

Of course, he’d missed Michelangelo’s duplicity. And even for a Liar, that was an impressive trick. The hardest people to read were the ones one was most emotionally attached to, because one’s own projections and desires would interfere with the analysis. One would see what one wanted to see.

There was no surprise in not noticing the knife in Brutus’s hand.

Katya Pretoria stepped back, shaking filthy locks of hair out of her eyes. Flecks of blood stuck the strands together. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “Now, if you will excuse me, Miss Katherinessen, I’m going to get Walter upstairs and try for some sleep myself. I have to relieve Agnes in the morning.”

Kii watches the rust‑colored biped climb. Its heartbeat is fast, blood pressure elevated, serotonin levels depleted, blood sugar dropping, lactic acid levels high, breathing shallow. It is, in short, exhausted, hungry, and dangerously emotional.

Kii waits until it regains its temporary refuge and is alone, in what the bipeds call privacy. Then he clears the wall and appears. “Greetings, Vincent Katherinessen.”

“Kii,” it says. “I was just about to call you. I know the Consent is that you will not assist me–”

“You wish to know if Kii can locate Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones.”

“I wish it, yes.” The biped pauses its speech, but not its motion. If anything, the short quick steps appear to Kii like a futile struggle against the inevitable edict. “And Lesa. Katya Pretoria knows what happened.”

“It shoots Kusanagi‑Jones in the back,” Kii says.

The russet biped rounds on Kii’s projected image, manipulators clenching. “What?”

“Your mate is unharmed,” Kii adds speedily. “It is struck by a sedative capsule. No permanent damage inflicted. Lesa Pretoria is also uninjured, and is restrained in a tangler.”

This linear, discursive mode of communication is vastly limited and inefficient, prone to misparsing. It requires finesse to communicate accurately in this fashion. How much more elegant to present information in poem matrices, with observed, stipulated, speculated, and potential elements clearly identified and quantified by the grammar of the construct.

The Katherinessen biped sinks on the edge of the bed, elbows on its legs, manipulators that seem powerful for its size dangling between its knees, knuckles facing. “Where are they?”

Kii accesses records, flicks through House’s files. At last, reluctantly, Kii says, “They are not in range of House’s nodes.”