Kusanagi‑Jones rolled onto his back and reached out to nudge Lesa awake, but she was already propped up on one elbow, peering over his shoulder. Her face, if anything, looked more lined with tiredness than it had the night before, and more of her scratches were inflamed, but the smile curving her lips was one of relief. “Come on,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, holding out his hand. “I’ll carry you down there.”
“Fuck that,” she answered. “I’ll walk.”
And she did, or hobbled, anyway, leaning on his elbow harder than either of them let on.
Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t even really mind when the first thing Vincent did was hug him hard enough that it knocked him back a step. Especially when the second thing he did was piggyback their watches together, and give Kusanagi‑Jones’s wardrobe a kick start and a recharge to baseline functional levels.
Later, after the medics had seen to his injuries, and while he was still tucked into bed hydrating on an IV while they worked on Lesa’s more serious wounds, Vincent brought him a tray, and spread jam on crackers for him to eat. They sat silently, shoulder to shoulder. Kusanagi‑Jones had edged over to make room, and Vincent leaned against the headboard with one foot on the floor and one propped up on the bed.
“Can’t go home yet,” Kusanagi‑Jones said at last, over their private channel, when it became evident that Vincent wasn’t going to bring it up.
“No,” Vincent answered, after letting the statement hang for a bit. And then he said out loud, “Eat the soup. It’s good.”
“I hate lentils.” But he ate it, thick and pasty and full of garlic, and it was better than he expected. He needed the protein, anyway. And the salt. “There’s Claude to deal with.”
“There is,” Vincent admitted, “still a negotiation to complete. And a duel to fight if we can’t find that lab, and link Singapore and Austin to it.”
Kusanagi‑Jones glanced down at his watch. Every light shone clean and green, except the blinking yellow letting him know fatigue toxins were building to the point where chemistry wasn’t cutting it anymore. He held it up so Vincent could see. “There’s also this.”
“You know what I think,” Vincent answered, his voice chilly and flat. Kusanagi‑Jones reached out and curved his fingers around Vincent’s wrist, and Vincent didn’t shake him off.
Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t remember how he’d ever decided anything on his own. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d just done what other people told him. “What are we going to do?”
Vincent shrugged to hide his shudder, and pushed another cracker in front of Kusanagi‑Jones.
“There are no limits to brane technology,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, ignoring the cracker.
Vincent slid off the bed, but gently, and moved away. There was a window in the room, shaded by louvers that broke the tropical sunlight into bars. He stood before it and laced his hands behind his back. “Once there were no limits to what you could discover with a sailing ship.”
“False analogy–”
“Fine. It’s false. What’s the moral implication of the damage we do to the planets we colonize? What about gravity pollution,for the Christ’s sake? Can you even begin to come up with a list of potential ill effects? Black holes? Supernovae? Planetary orbits? It’s not a clean technology. It just pollutes in ways we can’t begin to cope with.”
“Are no clean technologies,” Kusanagi‑Jones reminded.
Vincent continued as if he hadn’t said a word. “What if we expand into species less companionable than the Dragons? There’s a lot of what‑ifs.”
“Do what we’ve always done,” Michelangelo said. “Trust the next generation to solve their problems the way we’ve solved ours. Risk is risk. We live with it.”
“By hitting the cosmic reset button one more time. That’s a technical solution to an ethical problem. Hell, it’s not even a solution–it’s a delaying action. That’s what got us into this situation in the first place.”
“Entropy,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, “is a bitch. There’s still the retrovirus–”
“Angelo, I will shoot you myself.”
Their eyes met. Vincent wasn’t a Liar. He meant every word. “All right,” Kusanagi‑Jones said. “There isn’t the retrovirus.”
“There’s another solution,” Vincent said coolly, although the pit of Kusanagi‑Jones’s own stomach lurched when he realized what his partner meant. “We leave the Governors in place.”
“No!”
“Yes,” Vincent said. “Listen to me. There’s magic in it. Because once we learn to control ourselves–”
“Oh, no. Vincent, you are not sayingthis.”
“–the Governors become obsolete. On their own. If we clean up after ourselves, Angelo, they have no reason to intervene.” Vincent let his hands fall and squeezed them into fists, as Kusanagi‑Jones squeezed back against the headboard, as if he could crowd himself into the wall and somehow get away.
“Then we all die in a fucking Colonial revolt. You, me, your mother, Lesa, Elena. For a bunch of geniuses, you’re all idiots for thinking you can stand up to the Coalition.”
“New Earth stood up.”
“New Earth had help. And even if the Governors wouldn’t permit an open Coalition intervention, how many New Earthers do you suppose died in the covert retaliations for what I did to Skidbladnir? Wasn’t me that paid that price.”
Vincent’s answering silence was long. “The Dragons?”
“Might defend the New Amazonians. Not Ur. And this is the human society you want to protect? I don’t think so.”
He could hear Vincent breathing. He wondered if he knew what Kusanagi‑Jones was about to say. Kusanagi‑Jones, his eyes shut, rubbed his knuckles across his face.
His voice dropped. “Consent.”
Vincent’s flat expression, when Michelangelo opened his eyes again, seemed an attempt to convince himself that he hadn’t actually understood. Kusanagi‑Jones’s face felt numb.
He kept talking.
“Kii won’t give us the brane tech. What if we offer him another way out of a war? He’s ethical. We offer Kii the opportunity to engineer a virus that modifies the human genome, that inducesConsent, and we get the fucker to downgrade self‑interest as a motivating force.”
“The Christ,” Vincent whispered. They stared at each other.
“Vincent. This is…this has to be exactly–”
Vincent’s larynx bobbed as he swallowed, a shadow dipping in the hollow of his throat. “They were the first ones to die, you know. You can’t accuse them of hypocrisy. The Governors Assessed their creators first.”
“Cowards,” Michelangelo said. He shoved the tray aside and swung his feet out of bed, wincing as blistered flesh contacted the tiled floor. “Cowards who didn’t want to watch their program carried out. Could cause a genocide, but couldn’t stand to live through it.”
“This is just how they felt.”
“Heady, isn’t it?”
“Angelo–”
“No. Don’t argue. Think. What do you have that’s better?”
“Who are we to choose for an entire species?”
Michelangelo gave Vincent his sweetest smile. “Who better?”