Carnival

“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.

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