Carnival

Uncertain what cultural conditions would apply, their offices had issued each of them a full suite of licenses, which, of course, did not include any hats. Formal fashions on Old Earth tended to be more elaborate than those on colonial planets, which cleared about half the database, but Michelangelo had the advantage of his complexion and looked wonderful in colors that Vincent couldn’t remotely carry off.

Vincent chose a wrap jacket and trousers in rusty oranges and reds, simple lines to offset the pattern, the shoulders flashing with antique-looking mirrors and bouillon embroidery. That should dazzle a few eyes—and hearts, if Vincent was reading Miss Pretoria’s admiring glances accurately. He had absolutely no objections to using his partner’s brooding charisma as a weapon.

For himself, he chose a winter-white dinner jacket and trousers instead of tights, because he didn’t want to risk slippery feet if they were expected to go barefoot again. The jacket was plain, almost severe, with understated shaded green patterning on the lapels.

He’d wear a shirt and cravat to dress it up. Let them stare at Michelangelo’s chest; it was prettier than Vincent’s, anyway.

He was already dressed, toiletries arranging his hair and moisturizing his face, when Michelangelo emerged from the fresher. He flicked his watch, sending Michelangelo the appropriate license key. Michelangelo’s wardrobe assembled the suit in moments; he glanced at himself in the mirrored wall and nodded slightly, as if forced, unwilling to admit that Vincent had made him handsome. “I look like a Hindu bride,” he said, fiddling with his cuffs.

“I don’t think we have a license for bangles,” Vincent answered. “If we’d known how conspicuously the New Amazonians consume, I would have requisitioned some.”

Michelangelo’s disapproval creased the corners of his eyes. When he spoke, it was in their own private code, the half-intelligible pidgin of one of Ur’s most backwater dialects and a random smattering of other languages that they’d developed in training and elaborated in years since. It had started as a joke, Vincent teaching Michelangelo to speak one of his languages, and Michelangelo elaborating with ridiculous constructions in Greek, Swahili, Hindi, and fifteen others. It was half-verbal and half-carrier, tightbeamed between their watches—practiced until, half the time, all they had needed was a glance and a hand gesture and a fragment of a sentence.

It had saved their lives more than once.

“A planet like this,” Michelangelo said, “and they’re wearing nonrenewables and doing who-knows-what to the ecosystem. Haven’t seen forests like that—”

—outside of old 2-D movies and documentaries about pre-Change, pre-Diaspora Old Earth. Vincent knew, and sympathized. The frustration in Michelangelo’s voice couldn’t quite cover the awe. Ur didn’t have forests like that, and neither did Le Prй, Arcadia, or Cristalia. Never mind New Earth, which was about as dissimilar to Old Earth as it could be, without being a gas giant.

“See the logging scars when we came in?” Michelangelo continued. “Bet you balcony passes to the Sydney Bolshoi that those outgoing lighters are exporting wood.”

“Not to Old Earth. Not legally.”

They’d dealt with their fair share of environmental criminals in the past, though. And it wasn’t even necessarily illegal trade; there were other colonies, not under OECC oversight—and there are idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality.

Michelangelo knew it, too, and knew his denial was reflexive. “So smuggling happens. More to the point, what do you expect from a bunch of women? Short-term thinking; profit now, deal with the consequences later.”

Vincent shrugged. “They can be educated. Assisted.”

“Perhaps. You saw her shoes, right?”

Vincent nodded. “Pretoria’s? I didn’t recognize the fiber. What about them?”

“ Leather,Vincent.” Michelangelo’s stagy shudder ran a scintilla of light across the mirrors on the yoke of his jacket. “I’m trying very hard not to think about dinner.”

4

FOR THE THIRTIETH TIME, KUSANAGI-JONES WISHED THEIR downloads on New Amazonian customs had been more in depth. Although, given this was the first physicalcontact between the New Amazonians and a Coalition representative since the Six-Weeks-War almost twenty years ago, he was lucky to get anything.

He’d guessed right about the food, and he hadn’t even had to wait until dinner to prove it. There were cruditйs—familiar vegetables in unusual cultivars, and some unfamiliar ones that must be local produce amenable to human biochemistry. But he didn’t trust anything else, even if he’d been rude enough to wardrobe up an instrument and stick it in a sample.

Usually mission nerves killed his appetite and he struggled with the diplomatic requirements of eating what was set before him. As the gods of Civil Service would have it, though, when the options included things he was unwilling to consume even in the name of dйtente, he was practically dizzy with hunger.