Carnival

That didn’t matter: it would be obvious to anyone with a calendar and a brain where the virus had originated. Vincent knew the Coalition.

Someone would do the work himself.

Vincent was consumed—possessed—by the need to know the date, the exact time of Michelangelo’s execution. As if in knowing, he could fix the sun in the sky, control the death, contain it, crystallize it. As if he could ownit.

Ridiculous, when he didn’t even stand under the same sun.

He knew how it would be. He would observe the anniversary. He would grieve. Every year at first, and then perhaps after the fifth iteration or the tenth, he would forget, skip a year—and then it would be once a decade, a period of ten years frivolously chosen because his species had ten fingers for counting on, with no more cosmic significance than an astrological unit. A convenient meter, a king’s foot. An arbitrary standard, where Kii would count by eights.

And then Vincent, eventually, would be dead as well, and there would be nothing left of Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones, except a string of dead men’s names.

And Kii. Kii would remember him. And Kii, or some propagation of Kii, might someday make its way home to New Amazonia, and the Consent would reclaim its prodigal.

They might not change. They might never accept change. It was not in the ethos of the Dragons, other than the explorer-caste, essential and ignored.

But they could appreciate poetry. And the story would have an ending, after all.

Epilogue

IT CAME, UNBELIEVABLY, ON THERMOPAPER. A DNA-CODED diplomatic packet, read-to-destroy, for Vincent Katherinessen, Old Earth Colonial Coalition Diplomatic Corps, Lt. Col., Ret.

Hard copy.

He’d never held one before.

He licked his thumb and pressed it against the catch.

The message within was brief:

With one thing and another, Rome fell before they decided to waste the bullet. Coming the long way round, but I’m coming. Hope you weren’t kidding about introducing me to your mom.

Would you believe it?

All those years, all those worlds, and we were wrong.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She currently lives in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas, Nevada, but she’s trying to escape. Her recent and forthcoming appearances include: SCIFICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, On Spec, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Chiaroscuro, Ideomancer, The Fortean Bureau,Polish fantasy magazine Nowa Fantastyka, and the anthologies Shadows Over Baker Street(Del Rey, 2003) and All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories(Wheatland Press, 2004). She’s a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Hutzul, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it. Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.

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