Miss Pretoria smiled a quiet professional smile. “We think the Dragons were fliers. That’s one of the reasons we call them Dragons; half the access points to the dwellings are above ground level, some of them at the tips of spires. It used to be more like four‑fifths of them, but now that people have been living here for a hundred years, things have changed.”
A hundred New Amazonian years; 150, give or take, of Earth’s. “I was noticing the lack of plants.”
“Oh,” she said. “We don’t really–well, I’ll show you.” She gestured them inside, through a curtain of cool air that ruffled the fine hairs on Vincent’s neck. The doorway was simply open to the outside, air exchange permitted as if it cost nothing in resources to heat or cool. He bit his lip–and then lost his suppressed comment totally as they walked through the dim entryway and he got his first glimpse of the interior.
For a moment, he forgot he was inside a building at all. The walls seemed to vanish; he had the eerie sensation of standing in the center of a broad, gently rolling meadow bordered on three sides by jungle and on the fourth by the sunlit curve of the bay. A dark blue sky overhead poured sunlight, but less brilliantly. Vincent’s headache eased as his squint relaxed. He no longer had to fight the urge to shade his eyes with his hand; this was like the sunlight he was accustomed to, the tame sunlight of Ur or Old Earth.
“Better?” Pretoria asked, pulling off her shoe.
“Very much so.” He glanced around, aware of Michelangelo’s solid presence on his left side, and pressed his foot into the flooring. It was soft, living. Not grass, of course, or the tough broad‑turf of home, but a carpet of multiple‑leaved, short‑stemmed plants sprinkled with bluish‑gray trefoils. He gestured at the ceiling and walls. “This is…awesome.”
He adjusted his wardrobe so he, too, was barefoot. Michelangelo did the same, without seeming to have 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: thejob. 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 seenone, 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 dinner?”
Michelangelo tapped his watch. “I’m on chemistry. And three months of cryo. I’ll be fine.” As if cryo were rest.
“Do you suppose the mattress squeaks?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” The smoke in Angelo’s voice was enough to curl Vincent’s toes. All lies. “Besides, I need to do my forms. Do you want first turn in the fresher?”
Vincent knew when he was beaten. He shrugged and switched his wardrobe off, pretending he didn’t notice Michelangelo’s lingering, to‑all‑appearances‑appreciative glance as the foglets swarmed into atmospheric suspension, misty streaks across his body before they left him naked. “If I can figure out how to work it,” he said, and walked through the arch into the antechamber, Michelangelo’s eyes on every step.
The fresher was primitive but the controls were obvious, the combined bath and shower a deep tub with dials on the wall, handles marked blue and red, a nozzle overhead. A washbasin and a commode completed the accommodations, and Vincent had the technology worked out in three ticks.
He stepped down into the tub–there were stairs, very convenient–and set the dial for hot.
Lesa didn’t have time to go home and change before dinner. Fortunately, the government center was all smart suites, and she’d had the foresight to stash a change of clothes in her office. She wouldn’t even have to commandeer one of the rooms for visiting dignitaries.