Vincent chose a wrap jacket and trousers in rusty oranges and reds, simple lines to offset the pattern, the shoulders flashing with antique‑looking mirrors and bouillon embroidery. That should dazzle a few eyes–and hearts, if Vincent was reading Miss Pretoria’s admiring glances accurately. He had absolutely no objections to using his partner’s brooding charisma as a weapon.
For himself, he chose a winter‑white dinner jacket and trousers instead of tights, because he didn’t want to risk slippery feet if they were expected to go barefoot again. The jacket was plain, almost severe, with understated shaded green patterning on the lapels.
He’d wear a shirt and cravat to dress it up. Let them stare at Michelangelo’s chest; it was prettier than Vincent’s, anyway.
He was already dressed, toiletries arranging his hair and moisturizing his face, when Michelangelo emerged from the fresher. He flicked his watch, sending Michelangelo the appropriate license key. Michelangelo’s wardrobe assembled the suit in moments; he glanced at himself in the mirrored wall and nodded slightly, as if forced, unwilling to admit that Vincent had made him handsome. “I look like a Hindu bride,” he said, fiddling with his cuffs.
“I don’t think we have a license for bangles,” Vincent answered. “If we’d known how conspicuously the New Amazonians consume, I would have requisitioned some.”
Michelangelo’s disapproval creased the corners of his eyes. When he spoke, it was in their own private code, the half‑intelligible pidgin of one of Ur’s most backwater dialects and a random smattering of other languages that they’d developed in training and elaborated in years since. It had started as a joke, Vincent teaching Michelangelo to speak one of his languages, and Michelangelo elaborating with ridiculous constructions in Greek, Swahili, Hindi, and fifteen others. It was half‑verbal and half‑carrier, tightbeamed between their watches–practiced until, half the time, all they had needed was a glance and a hand gesture and a fragment of a sentence.
It had saved their lives more than once.
“A planet like this,” Michelangelo said, “and they’re wearing nonrenewables and doing who‑knows‑what to the ecosystem. Haven’t seen forests like that–”
–outside of old 2‑D movies and documentaries about pre‑Change, pre‑Diaspora Old Earth. Vincent knew, and sympathized. The frustration in Michelangelo’s voice couldn’t quite cover the awe. Ur didn’t have forests like that, and neither did Le Prй, Arcadia, or Cristalia. Never mind New Earth, which was about as dissimilar to Old Earth as it could be, without being a gas giant.
“See the logging scars when we came in?” Michelangelo continued. “Bet you balcony passes to the Sydney Bolshoi that those outgoing lighters are exporting wood.”
“Not to Old Earth. Not legally.”
They’d dealt with their fair share of environmental criminals in the past, though. And it wasn’t even necessarily illegal trade; there were other colonies, not under OECC oversight–and there are idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality.
Michelangelo knew it, too, and knew his denial was reflexive. “So smuggling happens. More to the point, what do you expect from a bunch of women? Short‑term thinking; profit now, deal with the consequences later.”
Vincent shrugged. “They can be educated. Assisted.”
“Perhaps. You saw her shoes, right?”
Vincent nodded. “Pretoria’s? I didn’t recognize the fiber. What about them?”
“ Leather,Vincent.” Michelangelo’s stagy shudder ran a scintilla of light across the mirrors on the yoke of his jacket. “I’m trying very hard not to think about dinner.”
4
FOR THE THIRTIETH TIME, KUSANAGI‑JONES WISHED THEIR downloads on New Amazonian customs had been more in depth. Although, given this was the first physicalcontact between the New Amazonians and a Coalition representative since the Six‑Weeks‑War almost twenty years ago, he was lucky to get anything.
He’d guessed right about the food, and he hadn’t even had to wait until dinner to prove it. There were cruditйs–familiar vegetables in unusual cultivars, and some unfamiliar ones that must be local produce amenable to human biochemistry. But he didn’t trust anything else, even if he’d been rude enough to wardrobe up an instrument and stick it in a sample.
Usually mission nerves killed his appetite and he struggled with the diplomatic requirements of eating what was set before him. As the gods of Civil Service would have it, though, when the options included things he was unwilling to consume even in the name of dйtente, he was practically dizzy with hunger.
And the wine the New Amazonians served at the reception was potent. So he crunched finger‑length slices of some sweet root or stem that reminded him of burgundy‑colored jicama and stuck at Vincent’s elbow like a trophy wife, keeping a weather eye on the crowd.
Penthesilea was the planetary capital, and there were dignitaries from Medea, Aminatu, Hippolyta, and Lakshmi Bai in attendance, in addition to the entire New Amazonian Parliament, the prime minister, and the person whom Kusanagi‑Jones understood to be her wife. There was also a security presence, though he was not entirely certain of its utility in the company of so many armed and obviously capable women.
Even that assembly–at least three hundred individuals, perhaps 95 percent female–didn’t suffice to make the ballroom seem crowded. They moved barefoot over the cool living carpets, dancing and laughing and conversing in whispers, with ducked heads, while the musicians sawed gamely away on a raised and recessed stage, and handsome men in sharp white coats bore trays laden with what Kusanagi‑Jones could only assume were delicacies to the guests. It could have been an embassy party on any of a dozen planets, if he crossed his eyes.
But that wasn’t what provoked Kusanagi‑Jones’s awe. What kept distracting him every time he lifted his eyes from his plate, or the conversation taking place between Vincent and Prime Minister Claude Singapore–while Singapore’s wife and Miss Pretoria hovered like attendant crows–was the way the walls faded from warm browns and golds through tortoiseshell translucence before vanishing overhead to reveal a crescent moon and the bannered light of the nebula called the Gorgon. The nebula rotated slowly enough that the motion was unnerving, but not precisely apparent.
When the silver‑haired prime minister was distracted by a murmured comment or question from an aide, Kusanagi‑Jones tapped Vincent on the arm, offered him the plate, and–when Vincent ducked to examine what was on offer–whispered in his partner’s ear, “Suppose they often feel like specimens on a slide?”
“I suppose you adapt,” Vincent answered. He selected a curved flake of something greenish and crispy, and held it up to inspect it. Light radiated from the walls–a flattering, ambient glow that did not distract from the view overhead.
“Are you admiring our starscape, Miss Kusanagi‑Jones?”
He glanced at the prime minister, hiding his blink of guilt, but it wasn’t Singapore who had spoken. Rather, her wife, Maiju Montevideo.
“Spectacular. Do I understand correctly that Penthesilea is entirely remnant architecture?”
Montevideo was a Rubenesque woman of medium stature. Regardless of his earlier comment regarding Hindu brides, Kusanagi‑Jones was minded to compare her to the goddess Shakti grown grandmotherly. Her eyes narrowed with her smile as she gestured to the domed, three‑lobed chamber. “All this,” she said. She led with her wrist; Kusanagi‑Jones wondered if New Amazonia had the sort of expensive girls’ schools where they trained apparently helpless young women to draw blood with their deportment. These women would probably consider that beneath them, but they certainly had mastered the skills.