Carnival

“It was the opposite of an equalizer.” Katherinessen shrugged. “Each round of Assessed were chosen on the grounds of arbitrary standards programmed into the Governors before they were released. It was the epitome of unnatural selection, for an elite. Agriculturists, scientists, engineers, programmers, diplomats, artisans, and none of them Caucasian—what more arbitrary set of criteria could you imagine for survival?”

Lesa laid her fork down. “I don’t believe equality exists.”

Elder Kyoto glanced around. “Why not?”

“Because Miss Katherinessen is right, but doesn’t take it far enough. Not only will whoever’s on top fight to stay there, but if you reset everyone to equality, whoever wins the scramble for power will design the rules to stay there.”

Katherinessen nodded. “So what do you think ispossible?”

“If I were the oppressed?”

A short pause, with eyebrow. “Sure.”

Lesa wondered if she could startle him. The Colonials didthink everybody on New Amazonia was an idiot, or at least naive. That much was plain. “Conquest. Revolution. Dynamic change would ensure that nobody ever wound up holding too much power. Fortunately for me, as a member of the ruling class, people tend to prefer the status quo to unrest unless they’re very unhappy. Which is why the Coalition isn’t entirely welcome here.”

She picked her fork up again and began flaking apart the buttery layers of pastry, not so much eating as pushing them around on the plate to cover the gilding. Katherinessen sighed. She thought it was satisfaction. She didn’t want to feel the answering glow in herself, as if she’d just done well on a test.

“You are so very right.” Katherinessen glanced at Kusanagi-Jones, who had stopped stirring his coffee, but wasn’t drinking.

“You know what they say,” Kusanagi-Jones quipped. “Dйtente is achieved when everybody’s unhappy.”

The bipeds communicate. There are the new ones, the males in their dual-gender system. Kii supposes one biologically convenient system for randomizing genetic material is as good as another, but the bipeds also usetheirs as a basis for an arcane system of taboos and restrictions. At first Kii thinks this is adaptively obligated, that the child-bearing sex was responsible for the protection of the offspring, and the society was structured around that need. There are local animals with similar adaptations—unlike the Consent, unlike the khir—where the greatest danger to cubs is posed by unrelated males, which prey on the offspring of other males.

Kii is startled to find an intelligent species retaining such atavistic tendencies. But then, Kii is also startled to find an intelligent species evolve without also evolving the Consent, or something like it. And since the territorial dispute, Kii is forced to acknowledge that no matter how developed their technology and aesthetics, the bipeds have no Consent.

Kii wonders if the other population of bipeds, encroaching again on the ones Kii thinks of as Kii’s bipeds, intend another territorial dispute. The timeslip is threads that converge and threads that part; patterns of interference. It is a wave that has not collapsed. The nonlocal population may transgress, driven, Kii thinks, by outstripping its habitat. There may be another dispute. The probability is not insignificant that the local population of aliens will be overrun. Kii is possessive of the aliens, and Kii’s possessiveness informs the Consent.