Carnival

The populace wouldn’t tolerate any deal they felt was made in secrecy. And if Pretoria house was going to succeed, especially with the added complication of something as unpopular as Parity in the soup, Lesa needed the people comfortable with, even fond of, Katherinessen. He’d have to take the risk, even in the wake of the attempted abduction.

They climbed the stairs to the stage and took their seats. House had provided several rows of chairs for the occasion, along with a canopy to offer shade and some protection from the inevitable afternoon squall, if proceedings lasted that long.

Except for Shafaqat, security fell away as they climbed. The rest of the detail lingered near the foot of the stage or mingled with the crowd. And Lesa, drawing a deep breath, looked down at her hands and composed herself as Claude Singapore and Maiju Montevideo, Saide Austin, Antonia Kyoto, Nkechi Ouagadougou, and four pairs of artists and dignitaries chosen to represent other settlements passed through the crowd in their own ring of security, pausing to exchange small talk and shake hands with those who came forward. “When they come up,” Lesa said, in case her charges didn’t know, “you’ll rise and shake hands with them.”

“Of course,” Kusanagi-Jones said, the left-hand corner of his mouth twisting up. “What else’d we do?”

“You could always break somebody’s neck,” Lesa answered. “Do you take recommendations?”

Kusanagi-Jones turned to check before he was certain she was smiling at him. It was a small, tight smile, such that he wondered at the subtext, but a secondary peek at Vincent yielded no further information.

He sighed and ran his fingertips across his wrist, activating the sensors in his watch. “Not more chemistry,” Vincent said.

“Just dialing my wardrobe down,” he said. “Hate to zap the minister of produce.”

“Do they have a minister of produce?” Vincent asked, between unmoving lips. Their eyes caught, and Vincent smiled, just with the corner of his eyes.

Michelangelo looked down quickly, disguising the sudden, tight pain in his chest. There had to be a way. There

hadto be a way. There was a way out of everything.

It was just a matter of finding it, and then having the guts to grab it and the strength to hang on. And standing ready to pay the cost. Kusanagi-Jones’s choice was a little too clear cut. He could be loyal, desert Free Earth, and keep Vincent—maybe. If they could pull this off. If he could bring home the brane technology—far more critical to their reception on Earth than any alliance with New Amazonia—it might be enough to buy him Vincent. All it meant was abandoning the ideal of freedom from the Governors that he’d been working toward for thirty years.

He even saw an angle that might work. All he had to do was convince Kii to give it to him as the price of keeping the Coalition out of New Amazonia. Destroying the Consent wouldn’t work. He didn’t think the virtual space they inhabited was housed in the Kali system. Or even in the local universe.

If it were him, and he had the technology to manipulate branes, to build himself a pocket universe of his desire, he’d build one where the cosmological rules encouraged a stable existence, or maybe lock it to an event horizon. What was the point of Transcending to virtual immortality if it just meant you still had to die when entropy collected its inevitable toll?

After long consideration of the night’s odd conversation, Kusanagi-Jones even thought he understood the theory. The technology was another issue, of course—but based on what Kii had said, that suggestive word cosmocline,and a technology apparently based on manipulation of quantum probability and superstrings, Kusanagi-Jones could make an educated layman’s guess at what was going on.

The mysterious energy might be generated betweenuniverses, in a manner analogous to a thermocline. Some quality—the cosmological constant, gravity, something even more basic—varied along the cosmocline, to use Kii’s word. And that variation produced a gradient, which produced potential energy, which could be converted into usefulenergy. They could stick the far end of a wormhole into the general vicinity of a star, even, he supposed, though he wouldn’t vouch for the integrity of the star afterward.

This was a species that could grab hold of a superstring and open up a wormhole to another universe as if tugging aside a drape. Kii’s promise to obliterate the Coalition stem and branch if it threatened Kii’s pets was not idle posturing.

It was just Kusanagi-Jones’s fortune that the Dragon was ethical and preferred to avoid atrocity. When convenient. And that he was constrained by the programmed equivalent of a neurochemical tether; he was physically (if that was the right word for a Transcended intelligence) incapable of acting against his species’ interests.