Carnival

The third piece, though, he couldn’t denigrate. Its return was a major sacrifice, big enough to make him uneasy. The level of commitment betrayed by the Cabinet permitting such a treasure to slip beyond its grasp indicated desperation. Desperation, or no actual intent to let the sculpture go for long.

Officially, Catharine Kimberly was considered a minor artist, but Kusanagi-Jones had seen some of her other work, and he didn’t think Phoenix Abasedwas the aberration that most scholars maintained. It was a marble sculpture—real marble, quarried stone, one of the last. Larger than life-size, it depicted a nude woman overcome with grief, her hips twisted by a drawn-up knee, her upper body thrown forward as if she had been knocked down or she was prostrating herself, sprawled into the abject line of her extended arms, which she seemed—by the sprung muscles of her neck, buttocks, and torso—to be fighting the miring stone.

They weren’t precisely arms, though. Where reaching fingers should have splayed, consuming stone gave the suggestion of wings. Broken feathers scattered the base of the sculpture, tumbled down her shoulders, tangled in the mossy snarl of hair framing her pain-saturated face. Her head was turned, straining upward, her mouth open in a hurtful Oand her eyes—roughly suggested, thumbprint shadows—tight shut. As if her wings were failing her, crumbling, shed, leaving her mired in unhewn stone.

And now that her wrappings were off, and he stood before her in person, he could see what the fiche couldn’t show. She did not merely grovel, but struggled, dragging against the inexorable stone and wailing aloud as it consumed her.

Her body was fragile, bony, imperfect. She was too frail to save herself. She was devoured.

Perhaps the artist was only a woman. Perhaps she’d never created another work to compare to this raw black-and-ocher-streaked masterpiece. But then, she might have, might she not? If she had lived.

And this was enough. It had impact,a massive weight of reality that pressed his chest like a stone. His eyes stung and he shivered.

Whatever the evidence of her name—and Kusanagi-Jones would be the first to admit that pre-Diaspora naming conventions were a nightmare from which he was still trying to awaken—Catharine Kimberly had been a dark-skinned South African woman who lived at the time of first Assessment and the rise of the Governors.

Operating under their own ruthless program, the Governors had first subverted the primitive utility fogs and modulars of their era, turning industrial and agricultural machines to the purpose of genocide. Domestic animals and plants had been the first victims, destroyed as the most efficient solution to a hopeless complex of ethical failings. Better to die than reproduce as chattel.

Then the Northerners had been Assessed, for their lifestyle and history of colonial exploitation. Following that, persons of European and Chinese descent, regardless of talent or gender.

Billions of corpses produced an ecological dilemma resolved through the banking and controlled release of organic compounds. Salvage teams were allowed to enter North American, Asian, and European cities, removing anything of cultural value that they could carry away, and then the cities were Terraformed under layers of soil produced by the breakdown of human and agricultural detritus.

After that, the tricky work began.

During the Vigil—the seven-year gap between first Assessment and the final extensive round—those survivors who could find a way were permitted to take flight. At the end of the Vigil, those remaining on Earth had been culled, using parameters set by the radicals who had created the Governors and died to teach them to kill.

The exempt were an eclectic group. Among them were poets, sculptors, diplomats, laborers, plumbers, scientists, engineers, surgeons. Those who created with their minds or with their hands. A chosen population of under fifty million. Less than one in two hundred left alive.

Catharine Kimberly had been spared that first Assessment. And so she had completed Phoenix Abased. And then she had taken her own life.

Which was a sort of art in itself.

Kusanagi-Jones reached out, left-handed, and ran his fingers down the cool, mutilated stone. It was smooth, flinty to the touch. He could pretend that he felt some energy in it, a kind of strength. Mysticism and superstition, of course, but Kimberly’s grief gilded the surface of her swan song like a current tickling his fingertips. He sniffed and stepped back, driving his nails into his palm. And looked up to find Miss Ouagadougou smiling at him.

“It’s a powerful piece,” she said, kindly patronizing. Just an emotional male, after all.

He smiled, and played to it. “Never actually seen it before. It’s revered—”

“But not displayed?”

“Not in Cairo,” he said. “We don’t travel to other cities much. Wasteful. It’s different to touch something.” He shrugged. “Not that I would rub my hands over it normally, but—”