Carnival

She grinned, and he remembered the sharpness with which she’d returned the volley after overhearing the unflattering nickname. “You’re not going to tell me men have one, too?”

Vincent shot him a look; Kusanagi-Jones answered with a shrug. They passed through three chambers, each one with soft full-spectrum light and stairs ascending to a gallery, each with white walls bare and smooth as the walls of a chalk cave.

“How much did they take?” Vincent asked. Even hushed, his voice echoed into many-layered resonance. “All this?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know what we brought. The lists I transferred.”

She smiled. “That’s maybe a twentieth of it—”

“The Christ.”

“Mmm. These vaults were on the surface then, public galleries. A museum. We brought what we could from Old Earth—”

“Women’s art,” Kusanagi-Jones said, but he was thinking On the surface? All this?

She stopped and turned, her shoulders square and her chin lifted. She folded her hands behind her back. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“I wondered why your ancestors limited the collection.”

She gave him that smile again, the toothy one. “Somebody else was taking care of the rest.”

“You’re content with the bias?”

She turned and kept walking. Another half of one of the big rooms in silence, until she paused beside a wall like any other. She lifted her hand and pressed the palm against the surface. “Are you content with yours?”

Before he could answer, the wall scrolled open and a door created itself where there hadn’t been a door a moment before. She stepped through before the edges had finished collapsing seamlessly into themselves, and Kusanagi-Jones had an awful moment of clarity. It came to him, lead-crystal sharp, that he needed to be thinking of this city not as static structures, but as the biggest damned fog this side of a starship. But Vincent didn’t look worried, so Kusanagi-Jones made sure he didn’t look worried either and followed Pretoria through the gap. He stopped so fast that Vincent ran into him.

The contents of this room were intact. It was a hundred meters long, with three galleried levels of well-hung walls, plinths and stands scattered about the floor. He had taken three steps forward, sliding out from under Vincent’s steadying hand on his shoulder, before he even thought to turn and ask their warden for permission. Still smiling, she waved him forward. Vincent dogged him, and he couldn’t even be bothered to be offended when Pretoria called after him, “Don’t touch!” although he did growl something about being housebroken, under his breath.

He folded his hands ostentatiously in the small of his back, and tried to remember not to hold his breath. There were pieces here Michelangelo couldn’t even name, although he had—many years since—taken a class in the treasures that had been lost during Diaspora, and he’d chipped all the relevant records before he left Earth.

Vincent leaned over his shoulder, breath warm on his ear, resting a hand on his shoulder where the skin of his fingers could brush Michelangelo’s neck. It was scarcely a distraction. He paused in front of a case with a long, chain-linked silver necklace, as much sculpture as it was jewelry, hung on a display rack like a barren branch. His chip told him the name.

“Matthesen,” he said, pointing with his chin so as not to give Pretoria an excuse to shoot him. “ Fear Death by Water. Supposed to be lost.” He knew the white marble miniature of a nude and pensive woman beside it without help. “Vinnie Ream Hoxie’s The Spirit of the Carnival. These must all be North American. That’s Jana Sterbak’s The Dress—”

Vincent didn’t even comment on the power required to keep the lights that shimmered words in archaic English burning across the wirework form. “That’s art?”

“Heathen,” Michelangelo said, more fondly than he intended. “Yes, it’s art. And oh…”

It caught his eye from across the room, a swirl of colors that seemed at first an amorphous form on a starry field, a nebula in dank earthen green and mahogany. A heavy tentacled brown arm reached from the upper left-hand corner of the canvas, shoving at the sky like an oppressive hand. Michelangelo gasped with the power of it, the vault, the weight, the mass. Just paint on canvas, and after he practically ran across the room to it, it shoved him back a step.

Vincent, who had followed him, swallowed but didn’t speak.

“The Lawrence Tree,”Michelangelo said. He didn’t need to look at the plaque. “Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“I’ve heard of her,” Vincent said. He almost sounded surprised. “What’s this one?”

Michelangelo didn’t know. He waved a question at Pretoria.

The warden came to them, as if reluctant to shout now that they were thick in the spell of the gallery. “Saide Austin is the artist,” she said, and Michelangelo took a moment to appreciate the irony of a woman named after a city named after a man. “It’s called Jinga Mbande.”