Carnival

“Curator’s privilege,” she said. She bent from the waist, her hands on her knees, and stared into the wailing woman’s empty eyes. “Tell me about your name.”

“My name?”

She turned, caught him with a smile. Like all the New Amazonians, she seemed old for her age, but also fit, and his threat-ready eye told him that she was stronger than she looked. “Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones. Quite the mouthful. Are those lineage names?”

“Michelangelo—”

“For the artist, of course. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.”

“Show-off,” he said, and her smile became a grin. She straightened up, hands on her hips, and rolled her shoulders back. Volatile male, he thought, and Lied to her a little. It wasn’t hard. If he didn’t think about it, if he wasn’t consciously manipulating someone, it happened automatically. He wasn’t sure he’d know an honest reaction if he had one. And if Miss Ouagadougou wanted to flirt, he could flirt with the best.

Second-best. There was always Vincent.

“Yes,” he said. “For the artist.”

“And Miss Katherinessen is named for Vincent van Gogh?”

He backed away from Phoenix Abasedand framed it with his hands. “Named for the twentieth-century poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ur has its own conventions. And his mother is a fan.”

“And what about the rest of it?”

“Katherinessen?”

“No, I understand a matronymic. Osiris.”

“Egyptian god of the dead. After the Vigil and the second Assessment, most of the survivors…you understand that it was rare for more than one member of a family to survive.”

“I understand,” she said. “I think the Glenna Goodacre piece should be in the middle. The Maya Lin fragment to block sight lines as one enters”—it was an enormous mirror-bright rectangle of black granite, etched with a list of men’s names—“and then as you come around, Goodacre and Kimberly beyond.”

“Saving the best for last.”

She paced him as he continued to back away, trying the lay of the hall from various perspectives. “Precisely. So your ancestors…constructed new families? Renamed themselves?”

“After heroes and gods and historical figures.”

“And artists.”

“Sympathetic magic,” Michelangelo said. “Art was survival.”

“For us it was history.” Miss Ouagadougou slid her fingers at full extension down glossy black granite. “Proof, I guess—”

“Of what came before.”

“Yes.” The tendons along the side of her neck flexed as she turned to stare at him. “Do you wonder what it was like?”

“Before the Governors? Sometimes.”

“It must be better now,” she said. “From what I’ve read. But still, the price.”

“Too much.” Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones. The futility of his own name stunned him. Five meaningless words. Five cultures, five entire racesof people. And all that was left of them, the living rememberer of all those millions of dead, was the syllables of a Liar’s name.

He swallowed. It hurt.

Her fingers brushed the wall again and fell away from the black granite. “It’s lunchtime,” she said. “I understand you have some dietary restrictions to consider. Shall we see what we can find to eat while the staff rearranges the display? We’ll come back to it after.”

“I’d like that.” He looked away from the wall, which was a mistake, because it put him face to face with Kimberly’s murdered angel. “I’d like that very much.”

9

VINCENT’S WARDROBE COULDN’T KEEP UP WITH THE sweat. It slicked his neck, rolled in beads down his face, and soaked the underside of his hair and a band where the borrowed hat rested on his head. His hands were still greasy from a lunch of some fried starchy fruit and tubers, served in a paper wrapper, and his wardrobe was too overwrought to deal with it.

He mopped his face on his sleeve, further stressing foglets already strained by the jostling crowd and the press of his escort on either side, and tried to regulate his breathing. The nausea was due to the heat, he thought, and not the food; his watch didn’t report any problems beyond mild dehydration and a slightly elevated body temperature, which he was keeping an eye on. It wasn’t dangerous yet, just uncomfortable, but Miss Pretoria was tireless. She tugged Vincent’s sleeve to direct his attention to a Dragon costume operated by two men, the one managing the front limbs walking on stilts and operating paired extensions from his wrists that simulated the beast’s enormous wings. “How could something that big fly?” he asked, checking his step to let the puppet shamble past.

“They must have been somewhat insubstantial for their size,” Miss Pretoria said. “The khir, which are the Dragons’ closest living relatives, have a honeycombed endoskeleton that leaves them much lighter than an equivalent terrestrial mammal. So the Dragons would have been about the same weight and wingspan as the largest pterosaurs. And we think they soared more than flew, and may have been highly adapted climbers.” She turned to watch the puppet proceed down the street, bowing and dancing, bells shimmering along the span of the wings.