Carnival

“No,” Lesa said. “But House will protect us. And it will mean something in terms of leadership. We just need to show that the Coalition canbe opposed. I’ve provided a full report on the Coalition agents, anyway.” She stretched her back until it cracked, and pitched her voice higher. “House, would you send the report to Elena’s desk, please?”

The walls dimmed slightly in answer, and Elena nodded thanks. “There’s something else.”

“News travels fast.”

Elena’s smile only touched one corner of her mouth. “Agnes said Kusanagi-Jones received a challenge card.”

“From Claude, yes.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

It was Lesa’s turn for a collected smile. “I’m going to fight for him.”

“Wait?”Vincent snapped, but Angelo met his gaze with that infuriating impassive frown. Vincent’s fingers tightened against his palm, as if there were any way in the world he could make Angelo do anything he hadn’t already meant to do.

“Can you think of a better plan?” And oh, his voice was so damned reasonable when he said it. “Cheaper than a war.”

“It’s not what I would call ethical,” Vincent said. He glanced up at Kii for support, but the Dragon only watched them, feathered brows beetled over incurious eyes. “You’ve no way to control it, and it will cost a lot of innocent lives.”

“It will,” Michelangelo said, folding his arms, his face relaxing into furrows of worry and grief. “And at least one not so innocent one.”

He meant himself. And he was letting Vincent seehim, the whole story, nothing concealed. The intimacy rocked Vincent in sympathetic waves of Michelangelo’s fear and desperation. He was scared sick. It was in the creases beside his eyes, the crossed arms, the slight lean back on his heels. Scared, and he thought it was worth doing anyway.

Killing off nearly half the population of Old Earth would sure as hell limit the threat of the OECC as a conquering power, Vincent would give Michelangelo that. He still didn’t think it was the world’s greatest solution to the problem.

“You’re not doing this,” Vincent said. “That’s an order.”

“The alternative is letting Old Earth drag the Coalition worlds into a fight that Kii and the Consent would end when it got to New Amazonia. Probably get twice as many killed on both sides. Nuclear option, Vincent. It will save lives.”

Kii’s feathered tufts ruffled and smoothed. “We would not be pleased to do so.”

“No,” Vincent said. “I don’t imagine you would. Kii, I have another option. Would the Consent, uh, consent to teach my people to create Transcendent matrices such as yours?”

“Your species may not be suited.”

“What do you mean?”

“My species chooses to copy our psyches into an information state, and to permit our physical selves to grow old and fail.”

“Of course,” Vincent said. It wasn’t as if one could actually uploadone’s personality, stripping the man out of the brain and loading it into a computer like a Raptured soul ascending bodily to heaven. One made a copy. And that left the problem of what to do with the originals.

“We accepted that to do so, our physicalities must die without progeny. The Consent was given, and so it was…wrought. No, so it abided.” Kii angled its nose down at them. “Kii thinks biped psychology is unamenable to such constraints.”

“Bugger,” Angelo said into the silence. “Shove it down their throats if we have to—”

“No,” Vincent said, rubbing his hands through his braids so the nap of his hair scratched his palms. “We’d have to sterilize the lot. An entire planetary population for whom procreation is the most cherished ideal? It wouldn’t change anything, except we’d have Transcendent copies of them in a quantum computer leading productive virtual lives. The plague’s a better idea. Which is not to say it’s not a lousy idea.”

He glared at Michelangelo, and Michelangelo unfolded his arms, a gesture of acceptance but not surrender. “We’ll wait,” he said. “For now. Try to come up with something better.”

“You’re content to walk around breeding retrovirus for the next two weeks?”

Angelo echoed Vincent’s gesture, palms across his scalp, but his version added a yawn. “Sounds a regular vacation, doesn’t it?”

On the way out, Lesa stopped in her room, discovered that Walter had apparently gone to the courtyard to stretch his legs, and got a leash before heading down to collect him. Far from gamboling with the children, the khir was sprawled in a sunbeam, sides rising and falling with steady regularity.

Awakened from his nap, he stretched lazily front and back and trotted around her twice on her way to the door, as if to prove that lesser khir might need to be leashed, but he certainly didn’t. All his blandishments were in vain. She clicked the leash to his collar as they stepped out the front door, and then crouched to tap the veranda with her forefinger and say, “Find Katya.”