Carnival-SA by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online Page B

noticed anyone else’s actions.
    Miss Pretoria placed her shoes on a rack by the door, and Vincent stole a look at them. He couldn’t identify the material. The security detail kept their boots, custom bowing to practicality.
    “This is the guests’ quarters of government center. The lobby is yours to make use of as you please. For your safety, we ask that you do not venture out unescorted.”
    “Is Penthesilea so dangerous for tourists?” Vincent asked. It had seemed tame enough on their two brief jaunts, and he was interested by how casually the local dignitaries ventured out in public. The culture, in that way, reminded him of pre-Repatriation Ur, a small-town society in which everybody knew everybody else. He craned his neck, looking through the almost-invisible ceiling, and watched some small winged animal dart overhead.
    “Dangerous enough,” Miss Pretoria said, with a smile that might almost have been flirting, before she beckoned them on.

    Somewhere between shaking Miss Pretoria’s hand and being shown to their quarters so they could get ready for dinner, Vincent started to wonder if he was ever going to hit his stride. Normally, he would have felt it happen, felt it fall into place with an almost audible click. Still, he had some advantages. Pretoria didn’t know how to respond to his relentless good humor. He didn’t rise to her provocation, and it set her back on her heels. Which was all to the good, because he needed her off-balance and questioning her assumptions. If nothing else, it would make it easier to keep up appearances for Michelangelo, who needed to see Vincent doing what they had come here to do: the job. The damned job, so important it took a definite article.
    Angelo was restless again, fidgeting as he pretended to examine documents in the hours they were given to themselves. Vincent pretended to nap, his eyes closed, and listened first to the silence of heavy heat and then to the patter of rain on the sill of the windowless frame that looked out over Penthesilea. For a moment, Vincent felt a pang at the necessity of that deceit. And then he remembered the Kaiwo Maru, the transparency of Michelangelo’s desire to bloody him. I took the therapy . It explained, at least, why Michelangelo had never tried to contact him, even through their private channels. They were spies, for the Christ’s sake. They’d kept their affair secret for thirty years; Michelangelo could have passed a note without getting caught. If he’d wanted to. If the job and the goddamned Coalition hadn’t been more important than Vincent. Probably the job, frankly. Michelangelo had never cared for politics, for all he’d been willing to sacrifice just about anything to them. That was fine. There were things that were more important to Vincent than the Coalition, too. Such as bringing it down.
    He sat up, rolled off the bed, and—without looking at Angelo—began to putter around their quarters. The suite was halfway up one of the asymmetrical towers. A single bedroom, with a bed big enough for four; a recreation area; and a fresher so primitive it used running water. Vincent had never actually seen one, apart from in antique records. The walls had the same simulated transparency as the “lobby” of the building, although now they showed the dark jungle and the phosphorescent sea. Overhead, blurred stars glowing through the dying nebula. Vincent paused for a moment to wonder at that—how the city itself vanished, except the bit he could see through the open window frame, and was replaced by the sensation of being alone in a reaching space.
    The New Amazonians must have adapted, but he found it disconcerting. It wasn’t something a human architect would design for a living space. There was no coziness here, no safety of walls and den. This was a lair for a beast with wings, whose domain and comfort were the open sky. Vincent grinned at Michelangelo, and nodded to the bed. “Do you want a nap before