Second‑best. There was always Vincent.
“Yes,” he said. “For the artist.”
“And Miss Katherinessen is named for Vincent van Gogh?”
He backed away from Phoenix Abasedand framed it with his hands. “Named for the twentieth‑century poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ur has its own conventions. And his mother is a fan.”
“And what about the rest of it?”
“Katherinessen?”
“No, I understand a matronymic. Osiris.”
“Egyptian god of the dead. After the Vigil and the second Assessment, most of the survivors…you understand that it was rare for more than one member of a family to survive.”
“I understand,” she said. “I think the Glenna Goodacre piece should be in the middle. The Maya Lin fragment to block sight lines as one enters”–it was an enormous mirror‑bright rectangle of black granite, etched with a list of men’s names–“and then as you come around, Goodacre and Kimberly beyond.”
“Saving the best for last.”
She paced him as he continued to back away, trying the lay of the hall from various perspectives. “Precisely. So your ancestors…constructed new families? Renamed themselves?”
“After heroes and gods and historical figures.”
“And artists.”
“Sympathetic magic,” Michelangelo said. “Art was survival.”
“For us it was history.” Miss Ouagadougou slid her fingers at full extension down glossy black granite. “Proof, I guess–”
“Of what came before.”
“Yes.” The tendons along the side of her neck flexed as she turned to stare at him. “Do you wonder what it was like?”
“Before the Governors? Sometimes.”
“It must be better now,” she said. “From what I’ve read. But still, the price.”
“Too much.” Michelangelo Osiris Leary Kusanagi‑Jones. The futility of his own name stunned him. Five meaningless words. Five cultures, five entire racesof people. And all that was left of them, the living rememberer of all those millions of dead, was the syllables of a Liar’s name.
He swallowed. It hurt.
Her fingers brushed the wall again and fell away from the black granite. “It’s lunchtime,” she said. “I understand you have some dietary restrictions to consider. Shall we see what we can find to eat while the staff rearranges the display? We’ll come back to it after.”
“I’d like that.” He looked away from the wall, which was a mistake, because it put him face to face with Kimberly’s murdered angel. “I’d like that very much.”
9
VINCENT’S WARDROBE COULDN’T KEEP UP WITH THE sweat. It slicked his neck, rolled in beads down his face, and soaked the underside of his hair and a band where the borrowed hat rested on his head. His hands were still greasy from a lunch of some fried starchy fruit and tubers, served in a paper wrapper, and his wardrobe was too overwrought to deal with it.
He mopped his face on his sleeve, further stressing foglets already strained by the jostling crowd and the press of his escort on either side, and tried to regulate his breathing. The nausea was due to the heat, he thought, and not the food; his watch didn’t report any problems beyond mild dehydration and a slightly elevated body temperature, which he was keeping an eye on. It wasn’t dangerous yet, just uncomfortable, but Miss Pretoria was tireless. She tugged Vincent’s sleeve to direct his attention to a Dragon costume operated by two men, the one managing the front limbs walking on stilts and operating paired extensions from his wrists that simulated the beast’s enormous wings. “How could something that big fly?” he asked, checking his step to let the puppet shamble past.
“They must have been somewhat insubstantial for their size,” Miss Pretoria said. “The khir, which are the Dragons’ closest living relatives, have a honeycombed endoskeleton that leaves them much lighter than an equivalent terrestrial mammal. So the Dragons would have been about the same weight and wingspan as the largest pterosaurs. And we think they soared more than flew, and may have been highly adapted climbers.” She turned to watch the puppet proceed down the street, bowing and dancing, bells shimmering along the span of the wings.
Her eyes widened as she turned to him. “Miss Katherinessen, you should have said something.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I think we’d better get you out of the heat.” She turned to Shafaqat, gesturing her forward. “Would you call for a car, Miss Delhi? And get Miss Katherinessen something to drink? We’re going to find some shade.”
“I’m fine,” Vincent said, as Pretoria latched onto his wrist and tugged him toward a side street where the buildings would block most of the glaring light. “Nothing a cold shower and a glass of ice water wouldn’t cure.”
Pretoria clucked her tongue and bulldozed over him. “You’re not adapted to this climate, and I’m notexplaining to my mother why it is that a Coalition diplomat suffered heat exhaustion under my care, no matter how manly you need to prove you are.”
He checked over his shoulder. Shafaqat moved through the press of bodies efficiently, her height, bearing, and uniform gaining a certain deference even from costumed, staggering merrymakers. Vincent had never seen a crowd like this on a Coalition planet: jostling, singing, shouting, raucously shoulder to shoulder and yet decorously polite. He wondered if it was a side effect of living packed into their alien cities, encircled by the waiting jungle, or of their rigid social strictures and their armed obeisance to the code duello.
Pretoria’s hand cooled his skin as she pulled him into the shady side street, which wasn’t any less crowded than the square. She pulled his wrist out and up as he made the choice to let her touch him without resistance. It was foreign, invasive. His skin crawled and stung when she pulled back, steadying his hand with her other one, and bent over it.
“You’re burned,” she said. “Not too badly, I think, but it’s going to hurt by tonight.”
“That’s impossible. My wardrobe should filter UV–”
But his wardrobe was overstressed, and of course he’d had to dial it down to keep it from zapping pedestrians–or Miss Pretoria, with her frontier touchiness. She squeezed his wrist, and the cool pressure of her palm turned to shocking heat. He yelped and yanked his hand away.
“Sunburn,” she said. “Good thing you wore long sleeves.” And then she reached out and caught his shoulders, pushing him against the wall, and he would have shrugged her away but the blood roared in his ears and the orange status lights flickered in his watch. The street swam around him, aswarm with people who might have been staring at him curiously if he could have focused on their faces. “You know,” he said, uncertainly, “I don’t feel too well at all.”
Her hand closed on his wrist again, searing, as she tugged him into motion. Shafaqat reappeared on his other side. “Miss Pretoria?” Something icy and dripping touched his hand.
“Drink that, Vincent. Miss Delhi, did you call the car?”
“I’m fine,” Vincent insisted, even though he couldn’t quite lift his feet. He broke Pretoria’s grip, more roughly than he had intended, and ducked his head, blinking, as he tried to get a good look at the display on his watch. Nausea made him gulp. “I don’t think I should drink anything.”