“What?” Elena’s voice shivered; through the careful modulation, Lesa read the blackness of her mood.
“She’s Parity. Robert was doubling for her.”
Elena laid her hands on the window ledge and tightened her fingers until the tendons on her wrists stood out. “Of course he was. I’ll have him flogged for that.”
“It gets worse.”
Elena turned away from the window. “By all means, draw out the suspense.”
“He didn’t run away to Antonia.”
“Then where, pray tell?”
Lesa held her hands up, open and empty.
She heard Elena take two slow breaths before she spoke again. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
“There’s good news,” Lesa added hastily. “I’ve talked with Katherinessen, and it seems I was wrong about Kusanagi‑Jones. He’s sympathetic, and brings Free Earth assets to the table.”
The latest indrawn breath hissed out again in a sigh. Elena closed her eyes briefly and nodded. “That is good news. And the deal with Katherine Lexasdaughter?”
“Proceeds. She stands ready to present a united front with us. Vincent–Miss Katherinessen–came very well prepared. Kusanagi‑Jones less so, in that he’ll have to carry word of our plans to his contacts on Old Earth personally.”
“Of course, out of twenty named worlds, the defiance of three won’t make much difference in terms of military might.”
“No,” Lesa said. “But House will protect us. And it will mean something in terms of leadership. We just need to show that the Coalition canbe opposed. I’ve provided a full report on the Coalition agents, anyway.” She stretched her back until it cracked, and pitched her voice higher. “House, would you send the report to Elena’s desk, please?”
The walls dimmed slightly in answer, and Elena nodded thanks. “There’s something else.”
“News travels fast.”
Elena’s smile only touched one corner of her mouth. “Agnes said Kusanagi‑Jones received a challenge card.”
“From Claude, yes.”
“What’s he going to do about it?”
It was Lesa’s turn for a collected smile. “I’m going to fight for him.”
“Wait?”Vincent snapped, but Angelo met his gaze with that infuriating impassive frown. Vincent’s fingers tightened against his palm, as if there were any way in the world he could make Angelo do anything he hadn’t already meant to do.
“Can you think of a better plan?” And oh, his voice was so damned reasonable when he said it. “Cheaper than a war.”
“It’s not what I would call ethical,” Vincent said. He glanced up at Kii for support, but the Dragon only watched them, feathered brows beetled over incurious eyes. “You’ve no way to control it, and it will cost a lot of innocent lives.”
“It will,” Michelangelo said, folding his arms, his face relaxing into furrows of worry and grief. “And at least one not so innocent one.”
He meant himself. And he was letting Vincent seehim, the whole story, nothing concealed. The intimacy rocked Vincent in sympathetic waves of Michelangelo’s fear and desperation. He was scared sick. It was in the creases beside his eyes, the crossed arms, the slight lean back on his heels. Scared, and he thought it was worth doing anyway.
Killing off nearly half the population of Old Earth would sure as hell limit the threat of the OECC as a conquering power, Vincent would give Michelangelo that. He still didn’t think it was the world’s greatest solution to the problem.
“You’re not doing this,” Vincent said. “That’s an order.”
“The alternative is letting Old Earth drag the Coalition worlds into a fight that Kii and the Consent would end when it got to New Amazonia. Probably get twice as many killed on both sides. Nuclear option, Vincent. It will save lives.”
Kii’s feathered tufts ruffled and smoothed. “We would not be pleased to do so.”
“No,” Vincent said. “I don’t imagine you would. Kii, I have another option. Would the Consent, uh, consent to teach my people to create Transcendent matrices such as yours?”
“Your species may not be suited.”
“What do you mean?”
“My species chooses to copy our psyches into an information state, and to permit our physical selves to grow old and fail.”
“Of course,” Vincent said. It wasn’t as if one could actually uploadone’s personality, stripping the man out of the brain and loading it into a computer like a Raptured soul ascending bodily to heaven. One made a copy. And that left the problem of what to do with the originals.
“We accepted that to do so, our physicalities must die without progeny. The Consent was given, and so it was…wrought. No, so it abided.” Kii angled its nose down at them. “Kii thinks biped psychology is unamenable to such constraints.”
“Bugger,” Angelo said into the silence. “Shove it down their throats if we have to–”
“No,” Vincent said, rubbing his hands through his braids so the nap of his hair scratched his palms. “We’d have to sterilize the lot. An entire planetary population for whom procreation is the most cherished ideal? It wouldn’t change anything, except we’d have Transcendent copies of them in a quantum computer leading productive virtual lives. The plague’s a better idea. Which is not to say it’s not a lousy idea.”
He glared at Michelangelo, and Michelangelo unfolded his arms, a gesture of acceptance but not surrender. “We’ll wait,” he said. “For now. Try to come up with something better.”
“You’re content to walk around breeding retrovirus for the next two weeks?”
Angelo echoed Vincent’s gesture, palms across his scalp, but his version added a yawn. “Sounds a regular vacation, doesn’t it?”
On the way out, Lesa stopped in her room, discovered that Walter had apparently gone to the courtyard to stretch his legs, and got a leash before heading down to collect him. Far from gamboling with the children, the khir was sprawled in a sunbeam, sides rising and falling with steady regularity.
Awakened from his nap, he stretched lazily front and back and trotted around her twice on her way to the door, as if to prove that lesser khir might need to be leashed, but he certainly didn’t. All his blandishments were in vain. She clicked the leash to his collar as they stepped out the front door, and then crouched to tap the veranda with her forefinger and say, “Find Katya.”
Walter whisked his muzzle across the deck and picked his way down the stairs, pausing at the bottom to sniff again before angling left, toward the bigger thoroughfare, threading between merrymakers at a rate that had Lesa hustling to keep up. She trotted, too, keeping the leash slack, though Walter occasionally turned to glare. “I’m running as fast as I can!”
He didn’t seem to believe her, but he was too well trained to lunge at the lead, even when irritated by streets clotted by buskers and food vendors. It had been Lesa’s idea to train the household khir as messengers, when she was Katya’s age, an idea that had turned out well. So well that other households had copied the trick once they found out how adept the khir were at memorizing routes.
The pace he set was better than a jog. Her honor jarred on her thigh with every footstep; her hair disarrayed and stuck to her forehead with sweat. She clucked to Walter, slowing him as they threaded between people so they wouldn’t accidentally trample other pedestrians and spark a duel, or overrun Katya and have rather a lot of explaining to do.
That Katya had gone on foot heightened Lesa’s suspicions. If she’d called a car–either public transport or Pretoria house’s communal one–her destination would have become a matter of record. Walking for exercise was one thing, but it was early for parties, even in Carnival, and if Katya weregoing to parties, she wouldn’t want to arrive sweat‑saturated and stinking.
Lesa had always encouraged Robert to know her children, to develop relationships with them, far beyond the customary. He had, and both Robert and the children had seemed to enjoy it.