Carnival

If Vincent was right, there was a machine intelligence watching him. And Kusanagi-Jones could only hope its instructions didn’t include the casual destruction of off-world human males poking about where they shouldn’t be.

It wasn’t as long a gamble as it seemed. He had, at best, speculation that the city might take action if it construed a major threat to its inhabitants—such as a ships’ complement of Coalition marines. But Penthesilea remained an alien artifact, and if it could be efficiently reprogrammed or trained, he had no hope of carrying out his mission. And yet, here he was, against reason and sanity, doing what he did in the hope it didn’t have protocols in place to deal with saboteurs and spies.

It was the old ambiguity that set his heart racing and dumped adrenaline into his bloodstream. Nobody sane would be here. But then, nobody sane would have taken this job in the first place. Especially when the most likely scenario, in the wake of the afternoon’s attempt on Vincent, had Miss Ouagadougou luring him to a lonely place where he could be abducted or disappeared.

He lowered the audio damping, checked the fisheye display to make sure the gallery floor was clear, and asked House, please, to open the wall.

Before he finished speaking, the frieze before him parted like drawn curtains. He stepped forward into an arched tunnel, unsurprised when the opening sealed itself behind him. An indirect glow rendered his light amplification redundant; he dialed it down, but in deference to his mistrust of Miss Ouagadougou he left the camouflage protocol intact.

The tunnel was undecorated, smooth sided, the walls velvety and dark. It tended downward, the walls corded with shielded cables. Lesser ran into greater to form a vast, inverted mechanical root system, which thickened toward a trunk as he descended. The overall effect was Gigeresque, though the textures were more reminiscent of Leighton’s velvets and silks.

He breathed easier. It was an access tunnel. Which meant, at least potentially, that Miss Ouagadougou had sent him to the right place. “Thank you,” he said, feeling slightly foolish. The city didn’t answer, but neither did the ongoing sense of observation (like a pressure between his shoulder blades) ease. He snorted softly when he realized he had expected it to, and kept walking.

Brightness spilled up the corridor as it leveled. He paused to let his eyes adapt. His wardrobe handled dazzle, but didn’t ensure fine perception.

Fifteen seconds sufficed. He blinked once more, to be sure, and stepped forward into a chamber not much larger than the suite he shared with Vincent. It was bowl shaped, the walls arching to meet overhead in a smooth, steep-sided dome. He knew he was underground, but the depth of field in the images surrounding him was breathtaking. They were not just projected into the walls, but a full holographic display.

If it weren’t for the tug of gravity on his boots, he might have been adrift in space. New Amazonia’s primary, Kali, glowed enormous and bittersweet orange on his left hand, smeared behind watercolor veils. On his right, totally out of perspective, floated New Amazonia, a cloud-marbled berry with insignificant ice caps, incrementally closer to its primary than Earth was to Sol, partially shielded from Kali’s greater energy output by the Gorgon’s polychrome embrace.

The fisheye showed him stars on every side. He turned toward the sun. And a peculiar thing happened. The nebula dimmed, parted along his line of sight, and left him staring at the filtered image of Kali. He knew it was filtered, because his wardrobe wasn’t blinking override warnings about staring into it, and everything around it didn’t flicker dim as the utility fog struggled to compensate. The bruise-limned darkness of sunspots hung vivid against the glare, the ceaseless fidgeting of the corona marked abruptly by the dolphin leap of a solar arch. It seemed close enough to reach out his hand and touch, enormous, though his palm at full extension eclipsed the sphere.

Teeth rolling his lower lip, Kusanagi-Jones returned to New Amazonia. The veils swept back from it as well, focus tightening, and as the holographic point of view swept in, he found himself retracing the rough course of the lighter that had brought him to this planet. He circled Penthesilea, and there the image hesitated. Waiting, he realized. Hovering like a butterfly on trembling wingbeats, accommodating the wind.

“House, show me the power generation system, please.”

The image swooped again. A flying creature’s preferred perspective, as internal decor mimicking wide open spaces and empty skies would be comforting to a creature with wings, where an ape’s descendent might feel cozy with limited perspectives and broken sight lines, the indication of places to hide.