Carnival

He rested his arm on the window ledge, squinting in the sunlight, and began to fuss with the interface on his implant. Recharging its battery, she realized, after a moment. Clever—and she thought it might have a system to capture the kinetic energy of his body when he moved. Meanwhile Kusanagi-Jones checked something on his own implant, then stood and glided toward the bathroom. She shook herself free of her urge to watch him go about his morning routine; he wasn’t as pretty as Katherinessen, but he moved like a khir, all coiled muscle and liquid strength. Instead she stood, drank off her tea—kept hot by the mug—and clicked her fingers for Walter. The khir poked its head from the basket beside the door and stretched regally, long scale-dappled legs flexing nonretractable claws among the carpetplant. Its earfeathers flickered forward and up, trembling like the fronds of a fern, and when it shook itself, dust motes and shreds of fluff scattered into the sunlight like glitter.

Lesa snapped her fingers again and crouched, holding out a piece of her scone. Walter trotted to her, dancing in pleasure at being offered a share of breakfast. It inspected the scone with nostrils and labial pits, then took it daintily between hooked teeth as long as Lesa’s final finger-joint. She dusted the crumbs off the khir’s facial feathers, and it chirped, dropping more bits on the carpetplant. Standing, its nose was level with hers when she crouched.

She bumped its forehead with her hand, petting for a moment as it leaned into her touch, then stood and walked toward the fresher. The door irised into existence; the shower created itself around her. She hurried. She had things to accomplish before the repatriation, and it wasthe first of Carnival.

Vincent sat on the window ledge, wearing the simplest loose trousers and shirt he had licensed. He sweated under them, the rising sun warming the moist air on his back. His face and chest were cool; his body was breaking the air curtain, but it didn’t seem to disrupt the climate control.

“Angelo,” he called, loud enough to be heard over running water, “do you get the feeling we’re being watched?”

Michelangelo’s voice drifted over splashing. “Expect we wouldn’t be?”

Silly question, sarcastic answer, of course. But there was something picking at the edge of his senses. Something more than the knowledge that there were video and audio motes turned on them every moment. More unsettling than the knowledge that somewhere, a technician was dissecting last night’s lovemaking via infrared and voice-stress.

Vincent frowned, imagining too vividly the expression on some cold-handed woman’s face as she analyzed the catch in Michelangelo’s breath when he’d finally consented to thrust up into Vincent with that particular savagery. It was rare that Angelo allowed glimpses of the man under his armor. And Vincent worked for them, he did. He always had.

“Such a gentleman,” he called back as the water cut off, filing the shiver at the nape of his neck under deal with it later. The Penthesileans said their city was haunted, and Vincent did not wonder why. It wasn’t just the wind or the trembling in the walls when you brushed them with your hand.

Sound carried in these arched, airy chambers. Vincent’s first reaction was that they would be prohibitive to heat. Of course, that didn’t mean much at the equator, and they wouldcatch a breeze—but these were people so energy-rich they let the tropical sunshine splash on their streets and skins unfiltered by solar arrays, like letting gold run molten down the gutters, uncollected.

He thought of Old Earth, her Governors and her painstakingly, ruthlessly balanced ecology, and sighed. If generating power were removed from the equation, that would leave agriculture and resources as the biggest impactors, and a utility fog was a very efficient use of material. One object, transfinite functions.

Michelangelo stepped out of the shower, making it Vincent’s turn. Their wardrobes could handle sweat and body odor, but bacterial growth and skin oil were beyond them. Besides, Vincent had an uneasy suspicion he was getting hooked on warm water flooding over his body. It was a remarkable sensation.

He kissed Michelangelo in passing, and keyed his wardrobe off before he stepped under the shower. Michelangelo would start complaining about the clothes Vincent had chosen for him soon enough, and then, if they hurried, they could make it to the docks and check out the cargo before their command appearance at breakfast and the repatriation ceremony.

“Angelo—” Hot water sluiced across Vincent’s neck, easing discomfort he hadn’t noticed. He checked his chemistry. He could afford an analgesic. And a mild stimulant. Something to tide him over until breakfast, where he hoped there would be coffee.

“Here.” He was in the fresher, his voice pitched soft and echoing slightly off the mirror as if he were leaned in close.

“I need an Advocate.”

Michelangelo’s silence was indulgence.