Carnival

It was wood, Michelangelo thought, darkly polished, the image of a well-armed woman with upthrust breasts pointed like weapons, the strong curve of her belly hinting at fecundity. She held a primitive firearm in one hand, a spear in the other, and had the sort of classically African features that were rarely even seen on Earth anymore. “An Amazon heroine?”

“A freedom fighter,” Pretoria said. She stood silent on his left hand as Vincent waited on his right, and they all breathed in the silence of the rich gleam of light on polished wood. The air was cool and smelled faintly of lemon oil.

“Old Earth history,” she said then, and stepped away as if she needed to cut the camaraderie that had almost grown between them. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the friezes.”

They went. Up a spiral stair— neck-breaking-type,Vincent mouthed at him as they climbed—to the third and final gallery. As they reached the landing, Miss Pretoria about a dozen steps ahead of them, Kusanagi-Jones leaned forward and whispered in Vincent’s ear, “If this is where the marines were killed, was Montevideo’s comment a veiled threat?”

Vincent coughed. “Pretty well-cursed veiled.” And then he looked up and fell silent.

Kusanagi-Jones hadn’t been prepared to be struck dumb again. You’d think you’d run out of awe eventually.And perhaps one would. But not right away.

The friezes, as Montevideo had so blithely called them, were a single long strip about three meters tall that ran the entire perimeter of the room. They had subtle detail and deep refractive color that washed to white when you weren’t looking at them directly, so they faded out as one glanced along their length, ghosts emerging and vanishing. At first he wasn’t sure if the images actually moved, but he occasionally stopped and stared at one detail or another, and became aware that the scene shifted, playing itself out in slow animation.

And he understood why the New Amazonians called the long-lost native aliens Dragons.

The pictured creatures were feathered almost-serpents, four-limbed counting the wings and the legs that helped anchor the flight membranes. The wings were bony and double-jointed, shaped for walking on and manipulating things as well as flight. The vane was stretched skin over an elongated pinkie finger that formed the longest part of the leading edge of the wing, five more fingers making a grasping appendage at the front of the joint. They were neither bat-wings nor bird-wings, despite the hairy feathers—or feathery fur—that covered the creatures’ backs and napes and heads.

The Dragons flocked through the spires of what must be one of the other cities of New Amazonia, because it was far taller and more towered than Penthesilea, and they raced clouds in jewel-bright colors. The ones in the foreground were as detailed as Audubon paintings. The ones in the background were movement itself. In among them were wingless animals, four legged, like lean reptilian jackals. They reminded Michelangelo of some kind of feathered dinosaur, what a theropod would look like if it ran on all fours.

A scientist—an anthropologist or biologist—might have cautioned him against jumping to conclusions. But to Michelangelo, it was breathtakingly obvious that the winged animals were the city builders, the native inhabitants. Even if several of them did not hold objects in their hands that he tentatively identified as a light-pen, a paintbrush, a chisel, the eyes would have given them away. They were all iris, shot through with threads of gold or green—but even in the thing the New Amazonians inadequately called a frieze,they were aware.

The Dragons towered three or four feet taller than he, even with their long necks ducked to fit into the frieze. They moved in the animation, the three humans the focus of their predatory attention. Michelangelo felt them watching, and it took the gallery railing across his lower back to make him realize that he had backed the entire width of the catwalk away.

6

AFTER THEY RETURNED TO THEIR ROOMS, MICHELANGELO took his time finishing his report to Kaiwo Maruand getting ready for bed. Vincent waited until he ordered the lights off and slid in beside him. He turned under the covers, cloth brushing his skin, and pressed himself against his partner’s back, draping an arm around Angelo’s waist. Michelangelo stiffened in the darkness.

“This is twice now,” Vincent said. “Are you going to tell me why you’re angry?” Again in their own private language, needlessly complicated, half implied and half tight-beamed, the parts of speech haphazardly switched and vocabulary and syntax swiped from every language either one of them had encountered.

For a moment, he thought Michelangelo wouldn’t answer. But his hand covered Vincent’s, and he said, “Twice?”

“On Kaiwo Maruand at dinner. I can’t think what I said to anger you, but it must be something.” He kissed Angelo’s neck.