Carnival

The aliens are that. Alien. Unscaled, unfeathered. Tool users with their soft polydactyl hands. They totter on legs, bipedal, hair patchy as if with parasites. But after Kii has seen a few, Kii understands they are supposed to look that way.

Sudden creatures, and so strange, with their hierarchies and their false Consent that leaves them unhappy, untribed.

But they know combat for honor, and the care of young, and they keep the khir. And they know art for its own sake.

They areesthelich, cognizant of order. And that is new.

The ghost-others think Kii’s fascination strange. ButKii is explorer-caste, a few still remaining—still needed even among the ghosts—and Kii is not content with experiment, manipulation, analysis. The others may engage with cosmoclines, programming, reordering the infrastructure of their vast and artificial universe. They may manipulate wormholes, link branes, enhance control. They have mistressed power enough to manufacture entire branes—objects similar to a naturally occurring four-dimensional universe—and learned finesse enough to program them. They have aspired to leave their shells and embrace immortality.

Nothing they are or desire cannot be made or remade on a whim. They are beyond challenge. They no longer evolve.

And yet Kii watches the alien curl around its cub as the cub curls around the khir, and Kii sees something new. Perhaps Kii is in need of a programming adjustment, but it is not violating Consent to wonder.

And things that are new are things that Kii’s caste is for.

On fourteen worlds, Vincent Katherinessen had never seen a city like Penthesilea.

The limousine they’d transferred into after the lighter’s splashdown came in low, skimming over the wind-ruffled bay and the densely verdant forests that grew against the seashell walls of the ancient, alien city. The pilot was giving the emissaries the view; she brought the craft up on an arcing spiral that showed off three sides of the skyline.

Vincent leaned against the window shamelessly and stared. The structures—if they wereindividual structures, given how they flowed and merged together, like tall colonies of some sea animal with calcified exoskeletons—were earth-shades and jewel-shades, reflecting a dark oily iridescence like black opal or treated titanium. Vincent wondered if they were solar. The colors were suggestive, but could be decorative—though he couldn’t think of a human culture that would choose that color scheme or the chaotic, almost fractal architecture that put him in mind of something arranged by colony insects, Ur-hornets or Old Earth termites.