Carnival

The sense of falling made his fingers flex, trying to clutch a railing that wasn’t there. He mastered himself, despite the sense that there was nothing to stand on as images rushed past incomprehensibly fast. And then they paused, arrested sharply, and he found himself staring at the back of his own head, the wooly curls of a dark man in a star-spangled room.

His fisheye—and his own eyes—showed him that the image hewatched hadn’t changed. But the room around the virtual Kusanagi-Jones dissolved, vanished into clear air, leaving him standing at the bottom of a sphere whose every surface writhed with twisted cable. It was a strangely organic growth, fractal in the way it merged and combined, coming together in a massive, downward-tending trunk beneath Kusanagi-Jones’s feet.

The hologram had stripped away the chamber’s walls, showing him what lay behind them. His neck chilled. He rubbed his palms against his thighs. “Follow the cables, please.”

The perspective zoomed down— throughhim, and he blinked at the glimpse of meat and bone and wiring and a momentary cross-section of a pulsing heart—and chased the tunneling cables down, down, to bedrock and a cavern in the depth-warmed darkness.

He was no electrical engineer. But an encyclopedic education, RAM-assisted parsing, and the information he’d chipped when he came out of cryo identified most of the machinery. Capacitors, transformers, batteries, a bank of quantum processors big enough to run a starship: essentially, an electrical substation the size of some Earth cities.

And no sign whatsoever of a generator. Just the power endlessly flowing from the quantum array—

Fromthe quantum array.

“Shit,” Kusanagi-Jones said. He had an excellent memory. He could recall Elder Singapore’s slightly amused tone precisely, as she had said, But you can’t get there from here.“The power source isn’t on this planet.”

A flicker of motion in his fisheye alerted him a split second before an urbane, perfectly modulated voice answered him. He turned, binocular vision better than peripheral, the fisheye snapping down on the sudden motion and giving him a blurred preview that didn’t remotely prepare him.

The head that hung over him was a meter long from occiput to muzzle, paved about the mouth and up to the eyes on either side with beady scales that ranged in color from azure to indigo. Flatter scales plated under the jaw and down the throat, creamy ivory and sunrise-yellow. A fluff of threadlike feathers began as a peach-and-cream crest between the eyes, broadened to a mane on the neck and down the spine, spread across the flanks, and downed the outside of the thighs. The forelimbs, folded tight against the animal’s ribs, raised towering spikes on either side of its shoulders—the outermost fingers of hands that were curled under to support the front half.

Support it couldn’t have needed, because the entire four-meter-long animal was lucently transparent. It was a projection.

“You are wrong, esthelichMichelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi-Jones. Planetary margins are irrelevant. The cosmocline is not in this brane,” the ghost of a Dragon said, and paused before it continued.

“Good morning, esthelich. Kii greets you. Kii is explorer-caste. Kii speaks for the Consent.”

BOOK TWO

The Mortification of the Flesh

13

“YOU OPPOSE CONSENT,” KII SAID, THE SPIKED TIPS OF folded wings canting back as it settled onto its haunches, knuckles extended before it like a crouching dog’s paws. Its long neck stretched, dipping slightly at the center as it brought its head to Kusanagi-Jones’s level. Its phantom tongue flicked out, hovered in the air, tested, considered. “You are disloyal.”

Kusanagi-Jones had no answer. He was poised, defensively, ready to move, to attack or evade. But there was nothing here he could touch, and the creature’s capabilities were unmeasured.

It paused, though, cocking its head side to side as if to judge distance, and nictitating membranes wiped across wide golden eyes. It seemed to consider. “Perfidious,” it tried, and Kusanagi-Jones could see that the thing wasn’t actually speaking. The voice was generated stereophonically, so it seemed to originate near Kii’s mouth—if Kii was the animal’s name, and not its species identifier or a personal pronoun or something Kusanagi-Jones wasn’t even thinking of—but the mouth didn’t work around the words, and its breathing flared and flexed nostrils, uninterrupted. “Treasonous,” it considered, lingering over the flavor of the word, and then shook its head like a bird shaking off water. “Disloyal,” it decided gravely. “You are disloyal.”