Her eyes widened; he tried to decide if it was calculated or not. From the shift of Vincent’s weight, he thought so. “Miss Pretoria hasn’t taken you to see the frieze yet?”
“There hasn’t been time.” Miss Pretoria slid between them, a warning in the furrow between her eyes. Interesting.
“No,” Vincent said. Vincent didn’t look up, apparently distracted by the vegetables, but he wouldn’t have missed anything Kusanagi‑Jones caught. His nimble fingers turned and discarded one or two more slices before he abandoned the plate untasted on a side table.
Elder Montevideo showed her teeth. Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t fault New Amazonian dentistry. Or perhaps it was the apparent lack of sweets in the local diet.
“After dinner?” she asked, a little too gently.
Kusanagi‑Jones could still feel it happen. Vincent’s chin came up and his spine elongated. It wasn’t enough motion to have served as a tell to a poker player, but Kusanagi‑Jones noticed. His own tension eased.
Vincent had just clicked. He was on the job and he’d found his angle. Everything was going to be just fine.
Vincent tasted his lips. “Perhaps instead ofdinner?” he said lightly, a quip, beautiful hands balled in his pockets.
“The food isn’t to your liking, Miss Katherinessen?”
Vincent’s shrug answered her, and also fielded Kusanagi‑Jones’s sideways glance without ever breaking contact with Singapore. “We don’t eat animals,” he said negligently. “We consider murder barbaric, whether it’s for food or not.”
Perfect. Calm, disgusted, a little bored. A teacher’s disapproval, as if what he said should be evident to a backward child. He might as well have said, We don’t play in shit.
Michelangelo’s chest was so tight he thought his control might crack and leave him gasping for breath.
“Strange,” Montevideo said. The prime minister–Singapore–towered over her, but Elder Montevideo dominated their corner. “I hear some on Coalition worlds will pay handsomely for meat.”
“Are you suggesting you support illegal trade with Coalition worlds?” Vincent’s smile was a thing of legend. Hackles up, Montevideo took a half‑step forward, and he was only using a quarter of his usual wattage. “There’s a child sex trade, too. I don’t suppose you condone that.”
Montevideo’s mouth was half open to answer before she realized she’d been slapped. “That’s the opinion of somebody whose government encourages fetal murder and contract slavery?”
“It is,” Vincent said. He pulled his hand from his pocket and studied the nails. Montevideo didn’t drop her gaze.
Kusanagi‑Jones steadied his own breathing and stretched each sense. Every half‑alert ear in the room was pricked, every courtier, lobbyist, and spy breath‑held. Elder Montevideo’s hand was not the only one resting on a weapon, but it was hers that Kusanagi‑Jones assessed. Eleven‑millimeter caseless, he thought, with a long barrel for accuracy. Better to take Vincent down, if it came to it, risk the bullet on his own wardrobe and trust that the worried, level look Miss Pretoria was giving him meant she’d back his play if the guns came out.
He wondered about the New Amazonian rules of honor and if it mattered that Vincent was male and that he didn’t seemarmed.
And then Vincent looked up, as if his distraction had been a casual thing, and gave her a few more watts. He murmured, almost wistfully, “Now that we’ve established that we think each other monsters, do you suppose we can get back to business?”
She blinked first, but Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t let himself stop counting breaths until Claude Singapore nudged her, and started to laugh. “He almost got you,” Singapore said, and Montevideo tipped her head, acknowledging the touch.
Just a couple of fairies. He gritted his teeth into an answering smile. Apparently, it would have been thought a victory for Vincent if he provoked the woman enough to make her draw. A Pyrrhic victory, for most men in their shoes–
Singapore glanced at her watch–an old‑fashioned wristwatch with a band, external–and then laced her right hand through Montevideo’s arm. “We’ll be wanted upstairs.”
Vincent fell in beside her and Kusanagi‑Jones assumed his habitual place. He didn’t think Singapore was used to looking up to anybody, and she had to, to Vincent. “What I’d like to do instead of dinner is get a look at your power plant.”
“Unfortunately,” Singapore said, “we can’t arrange that.”
“Official secrets?” Vincent asked, not tooarchly. “We’ll have to talk about it eventually, if we’re going to work out an equitable trade arrangement.”
Kusanagi‑Jones could have cut himself on Singapore’s smile. “Are you suggesting that the Cabinet will resort to extortion, Miss Katherinessen? Because I assure you, the restoration of our appropriated cultural treasures is a condition of negotiation, not a bargaining chip.”
She ushered them through the door. A half‑dozen people around the room disengaged themselves from their conversations and followed them into the hall.
“It would make a nice gesture of goodwill,” said Vincent.
And Elder Singapore smiled. “It might. But you can’t get there from here.”
The route to the dining room wound up a flight of stairs and across an open footbridge, almost a catwalk. Kusanagi‑Jones breathed shallowly; his chemistry was mostly coping with the alien pollen, but he didn’t want to tax it. He leaned on Vincent’s arm lightly as Vincent fell back beside him. “Why are we antagonizing the people in charge?”
“Did you see Montevideo glance at her wife?”
Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t bother to hide his shrug.
“They’re not the ones in charge. Maybe a little fire will draw the real negotiators out.” Vincent paused and smiled tightly. “Also, aren’t you curious why they wanted us to see these friezes and Miss Pretoria was all a‑prickle about it? Because I know I am.”
Kusanagi‑Jones’s hands wanted to shake, but he wouldn’t let them. They entered a banquet room, and he saw Vincent seated on the prime minister’s left and took his own seat next to Miss Pretoria, touching the glossy wood of the chairs and table as if he were used to handling such things. He sat, and discussed his dietary needs with Pretoria, then allowed her to serve him–which she did adroitly. The food was presented family style, rather than on elaborately arranged and garnished plates, whisked from some mysterious otherworld to grace the incredible solid wooden table.
There werevegetarian options, although most of them seemed to contain some sort of animal byproducts. But the scent of charred flesh made eating anything–even the salad and the bread with oil and vinegar that Miss Pretoria assured him was safe–an exercise in diplomatic self‑discipline. It smelled like a combat zone; all that was missing was the reek of scorched hair and the ozone tang of burned‑out utility fogs.
The cheese and butter and sour cream were set on the table between plates laden with slices of roasted animal flesh, like some scene out of atavistic history–the sort of thing you expected to find in galleries next to paintings of beheading and boiling in oil and other barbaric commonplaces. Michelangelo brushed his sleeve up and touched his watch again, adjusting his blood chemistry to compensate for creeping nausea, and kept his eyes on his own plate until he finished eating.