“If I were the oppressed?”
A short pause, with eyebrow. “Sure.”
Lesa wondered if she could startle him. The Colonials didthink everybody on New Amazonia was an idiot, or at least naive. That much was plain. “Conquest. Revolution. Dynamic change would ensure that nobody ever wound up holding too much power. Fortunately for me, as a member of the ruling class, people tend to prefer the status quo to unrest unless they’re very unhappy. Which is why the Coalition isn’t entirely welcome here.”
She picked her fork up again and began flaking apart the buttery layers of pastry, not so much eating as pushing them around on the plate to cover the gilding. Katherinessen sighed. She thought it was satisfaction. She didn’t want to feel the answering glow in herself, as if she’d just done well on a test.
“You are so very right.” Katherinessen glanced at Kusanagi‑Jones, who had stopped stirring his coffee, but wasn’t drinking.
“You know what they say,” Kusanagi‑Jones quipped. “Dйtente is achieved when everybody’s unhappy.”
The bipeds communicate. There are the new ones, the males in their dual‑gender system. Kii supposes one biologically convenient system for randomizing genetic material is as good as another, but the bipeds also use theirs as a basis for an arcane system of taboos and restrictions. At first Kii thinks this is adaptively obligated, that the child‑bearing sex was responsible for the protection of the offspring, and the society was structured around that need. There are local animals with similar adaptations–unlike the Consent, unlike the khir–where the greatest danger to cubs is posed by unrelated males, which prey on the offspring of other males.
Kii is startled to find an intelligent species retaining such atavistic tendencies. But then, Kii is also startled to find an intelligent species evolve without also evolving the Consent, or something like it. And since the territorial dispute, Kii is forced to acknowledge that no matter how developed their technology and aesthetics, the bipeds have no Consent.
Kii wonders if the other population of bipeds, encroaching again on the ones Kii thinks of as Kii’s bipeds, intend another territorial dispute. The timeslip is threads that converge and threads that part; patterns of interference. It is a wave that has not collapsed. The nonlocal population may transgress, driven, Kii thinks, by outstripping its habitat. There may be another dispute. The probability is not insignificant that the local population of aliens will be overrun. Kii is possessive of the aliens, and Kii’s possessiveness informs the Consent.
If the other population encroaches, Kii wishes to intervene again, more strongly than before. The Consent is not so sanguine.
Yet.
5
EVEN VINCENT WAS RELIEVED WHEN DINNER ENDED, though it segued without hesitation into another endless reception. This one at least had more the air of a party, and finally there were a number of other men present.
As soon as they left the table, the elder Pretoria cut Michelangelo off Vincent’s arm as neatly as impoverished nobility absconding with an heiress at a debutante’s ball. Despite Michelangelo’s long‑suffering eyeroll, he went, flirting gamely.
Vincent took this as a sign that the business portion of the evening had ended, and availed himself of the bar. He wasn’t going to get drunk–his watch would see to that–but he would examine the options. It would give him something to do with his hands while considering the evening’s haul.
He accepted the drink he’d pointed to in a moment of bravado–something greenish‑gold and slightly cloudy, a spirit infused with alien herbs, if his nose didn’t mislead him–and leaned into a quiet corner, for the moment observed by no one except the security detail, who appeared to be making sure he didn’t wander off.
It was a reversal of his and Michelangelo’s usual roles, but not an unpracticed one. Michelangelo could pretend to charisma as effectively as anything else, and dominate a room with ease. And the dynamics of an assembly such as this could be revealing. It was like watching a dance that was also combat and a game of chess.
Miss Pretoria, for example, was leaving a conversational cluster that included the person Vincent had tentatively identified as the minister of the militia–of Security, he corrected himself, which was a significant choice of title on its own–and crossing to the group that encompassed Michelangelo and Elena Pretoria, and a tall, beautifully dressed, dark‑skinned man with a shaved‑slick scalp. With whom, Vincent noticed, Michelangelo was now flirting. Vincent’s fingers curled on his glass, and he pressed his shoulders against the warm, slightly vibrating wall of the building, feeling it conform to his body.
The prime minister and her entourage occupied a space that was more or less on the left center of the ballroom, and somehow managed to give the impression of being off in a corner–and one diametrically opposed to the Pretoria household at that. And there was something else interesting: as Lesa crossed the room, nobody wanted to catch her eye, despite her occasional nods and words she shared with those she passed. Unobtrusively, a path opened before her, but it wasn’t the standing aside of respect. It was a withdrawal. I wonder what she is when she’s not a tour guide and turnkey.
He dug his toes into the groundcover and watched. People could give themselves away in the oddest manners. Even simply by the ways in which they made sure of their guard. For example, the faint discomfort with which Lesa responded to a broad‑shouldered, bronzed man who entrapped her a few steps from the relative haven of her mother’s enclave. He had long hair cut blunt at his shoulders, the fair, blondish‑brown color and coarse wavy texture even more unusual than Vincent’s auburn, and his hands were knotted whitely with old scars. He spoke softly, eyes averted, and Lesa reached out and tucked a strand of that wonderful hair behind his ear in a good counterfeit of flirtation before excusing herself to join her family.
Vincent was just finally getting around to paying some attention to his drink when the minister of Security–the one who had been about to bring biology into the dinner argument until Singapore shut her down–appeared at his elbow. “Miss Katherinessen,” she said, mispronouncing his name kath‑er‑in‑ES‑sen,“I’m sorry to see you’ve been abandoned.”
She held out her hand and he took it gingerly. The wine on her breath bridged the distance between them easily. The New Amazonian disregard for personal space, but also something more.
He would have stepped back, but he was already against the wall. “I’m self‑amusing,” he said, and met her gaze directly, the way Penthesilean men did not.
She edged closer, oozing confidence. She expected him to be intimidated and perhaps flattered as she laid her hand on his arm. He’d seen the expression on her face on enough old warhorses cornering sweet young things at embassy parties: a predator gloating over trapped prey.
He was supposed to blush and look down, and maybe sidle away. Instead, he pictured Michelangelo standing where he was standing now, and burst out laughing.
She stepped back, abruptly, covering her discomfiture with a scowl. “I wasn’t aware I was so amusing.”
“Actually,” Vincent said, stepping around her now that he’d bought himself room, “I find the corner by the door’s the best place to be. Are you attending the ceremony tomorrow, Elder?”
He turned to face her, which put his own back to the room–but that wasn’t too unsettling when Michelangelo had it covered. And now she was the one trapped against the wall, which was a tactical gain.