Carnival

Miss Pretoria smiled a quiet professional smile. “We think the Dragons were fliers. That’s one of the reasons we call them Dragons; half the access points to the dwellings are above ground level, some of them at the tips of spires. It used to be more like four-fifths of them, but now that people have been living here for a hundred years, things have changed.”

A hundred New Amazonian years; 150, give or take, of Earth’s. “I was noticing the lack of plants.”

“Oh,” she said. “We don’t really—well, I’ll show you.” She gestured them inside, through a curtain of cool air that ruffled the fine hairs on Vincent’s neck. The doorway was simply open to the outside, air exchange permitted as if it cost nothing in resources to heat or cool. He bit his lip—and then lost his suppressed comment totally as they walked through the dim entryway and he got his first glimpse of the interior.

For a moment, he forgot he was inside a building at all. The walls seemed to vanish; he had the eerie sensation of standing in the center of a broad, gently rolling meadow bordered on three sides by jungle and on the fourth by the sunlit curve of the bay. A dark blue sky overhead poured sunlight, but less brilliantly. Vincent’s headache eased as his squint relaxed. He no longer had to fight the urge to shade his eyes with his hand; this was like the sunlight he was accustomed to, the tame sunlight of Ur or Old Earth.

“Better?” Pretoria asked, pulling off her shoe.

“Very much so.” He glanced around, aware of Michelangelo’s solid presence on his left side, and pressed his foot into the flooring. It was soft, living. Not grass, of course, or the tough broad-turf of home, but a carpet of multiple-leaved, short-stemmed plants sprinkled with bluish-gray trefoils. He gestured at the ceiling and walls. “This is…awesome.”

He adjusted his wardrobe so he, too, was barefoot. Michelangelo did the same, without seeming to have noticed anyone else’s actions.

Miss Pretoria placed her shoes on a rack by the door, and Vincent stole a look at them. He couldn’t identify the material. The security detail kept their boots, custom bowing to practicality.

“This is the guests’ quarters of government center. The lobby is yours to make use of as you please. For your safety, we ask that you do not venture out unescorted.”

“Is Penthesilea so dangerous for tourists?” Vincent asked. It had seemed tame enough on their two brief jaunts, and he was interested by how casually the local dignitaries ventured out in public. The culture, in that way, reminded him of pre-Repatriation Ur, a small-town society in which everybody knew everybody else. He craned his neck, looking through the almost-invisible ceiling, and watched some small winged animal dart overhead.

“Dangerous enough,” Miss Pretoria said, with a smile that might almost have been flirting, before she beckoned them on.

Somewhere between shaking Miss Pretoria’s hand and being shown to their quarters so they could get ready for dinner, Vincent started to wonder if he was ever going to hit his stride. Normally, he would have felt it happen, felt it fall into place with an almost audible click. Still, he had some advantages. Pretoria didn’t know how to respond to his relentless good humor. He didn’t rise to her provocation, and it set her back on her heels. Which was all to the good, because he needed her off-balance and questioning her assumptions. If nothing else, it would make it easier to keep up appearances for Michelangelo, who needed to see Vincent doing what they had come here to do: thejob. The damned job, so important it took a definite article.

Angelo was restless again, fidgeting as he pretended to examine documents in the hours they were given to themselves. Vincent pretended to nap, his eyes closed, and listened first to the silence of heavy heat and then to the patter of rain on the sill of the windowless frame that looked out over Penthesilea.

For a moment, Vincent felt a pang at the necessity of that deceit. And then he remembered the Kaiwo Maru,the transparency of Michelangelo’s desire to bloody him. I took the therapy.

It explained, at least, why Michelangelo had never tried to contact him, even through their private channels. They were spies, for the Christ’s sake. They’d kept their affair secret for thirty years; Michelangelo could have passed a note without getting caught. If he’d wanted to. If the job and the goddamned Coalition hadn’t been more important than Vincent. Probably the job, frankly. Michelangelo had never cared for politics, for all he’d been willing to sacrifice just about anything to them.

That was fine. There were things that were more important to Vincent than the Coalition, too.

Such as bringing it down.