She snorted. “Just doing my job.”
“Any word on who might have been behind it? Or what the goal was?”
She shrugged and slid a pastry onto her own plate. “We’ll know soon enough. I wounded one of them. As for what they wanted–a hostage? To open negotiations of their own? To demand a Coalition withdrawal in return for your life?” She lowered her voice and obscured her mouth behind her hand as she ate. “It all depends what faction we’re talking about.”
Which was a code phrase, one that should have identified her as his contact, based on the information in the chip he’d slipped Robert. But he just rolled his eyes and sipped his wine, far too relaxed for her to believe he had made the connection. “Then security will be tighter from now on.”
“No more slipping through the streets incognito,” Lesa agreed. She glanced at Elena; Elena frowned and tilted her head. Back off. Yes. Lesa thought she’d know if Vincent were dissembling. He might be just as good as she was, but he wasn’t any better. Instead, Lesa leaned around Vincent and caught Robert’s eye, beckoning with a buttery finger. “Would you like to meet my son, Vincent?”
He followed the line of her attention. “Very much,” he said. “You have two children?”
“The obligation is three,” she answered. “My eldest died, but I’ve met it, yes. I could start my own household, become an Elder in my own right.”
“If you wanted?”
“There’s a male whose contract I want to buy. Until it’s available, there’s no point.”
“You wouldn’t have to breed to get married if New Amazonia accepted the Coalition,” he said, dryly.
She smiled. “And you wouldn’t have three sisters and a brother if Ur had fallen into line a few years sooner.”
The look Katherinessen gave her was ever so slightly impressed. It was public record, and Katherine Lexasdaughter’s conceit in naming each of her five children–Valerie, Victoria, Vivian, Vincent, and Valentine–made the bit of data stand out in Lesa’s recall. As Robert came around the table holding Julian’s hand, she smiled at them and scooted back, opening a gap. Her son tugged loose of his sire’s grip and came to her, plopping himself onto her thigh. It wouldn’t last, of course. Any day now, Julian would decide he was too old for sitting on laps and listening to Mother, and not long after that, he’d enter the Trials. If he lived, he’d earn a contract in some other woman’s house.
Unless he beat the odds, of course. And grew up gentle. “Julian,” she said, when he had wiggled himself comfortable and Robert had settled down cross‑legged, not far away. “I’d like you to meet Vincent Katherinessen. He’s a diplomat like me.”
“He’s a male,” Julian said, with childish solipsism. “He can’t be a diplomat. That’s for girls.”
Whatever he thought of Vincent, he held out his hand anyway, and Vincent accepted it. “Pleased to meet you, Julian.”
“Vincent’s gentle,” Lesa said. She met Katherinessen’s golden‑brown eyes, noticing the splinters of blue and yellow around the pupils. “He can be anything he wants.”
Their hands interlaced, Julian’s smaller and darker and more callused, and Julian winced. “You got burned.”
“I did,” Vincent said. “My sun protection failed.”
“That was silly. You need a sunpatch.” He pointed to the shoulder of his jerkin, craning his neck so he could see what he was pointing at–a small patch in colors that matched the one Robert wore on his wrist cuff. “It changes color when you get too much UV. So you know to go inside.”
“I think I do need one of those. May I look?”
Julian nodded, but Vincent had been looking at Lesa when he asked. She slid her hand against her son’s neck and lifted his hair aside, tacit permission. Julian wriggled; the touch tickled. But he sat mostly still as Vincent leaned forward to inspect the sunpatch, oblivious to Kusanagi‑Jones watching from farther down the table with an expression that even Lesa found unreadable adorning his face.
“Where do you get one of those?” Vincent asked. He addressed Julian directly again, and Julian, charmed, smiled shyly and looked down.
“House,” he said.
“Do you think House would make me one?”
Julian ducked further, still smiling, and nodded, his courage for strangers exhausted.
“If you asked,” Lesa supplied.
Vincent leaned back, a half‑second after Lesa would have, and let Julian tug away. He drew his knees up and buried his face against Lesa’s shoulder, hands in front of his mouth. He was a warm compact bundle of muscle and bone, and she closed her eyes for a moment, leaning her chin on his hair. “He likes astronomy,” she said. “And computers.”
Vincent picked up his wineglass and leaned back, raising his eyes to the slow gorgeous burn of the Gorgon transmitted to the ceiling overhead. “Bad planet for getting to look at the stars from,” he commented, without audible irony.
“I know,” Lesa said. “Are anyof them any good?”
12
THROUGHOUT DINNER, KUSANAGI‑JONES WAS AWARE OF AN increasing level of noise from the street. Vincent gave him an arch look at one point–the invitation had been for food and Carnival–but Kusanagi‑Jones answered it with a sidelong shake of his head. I’ll chain you to a wall if you even suggest going out there.
Fortunately, in the constellation of VIPs that Kusanagi‑Jones had secured over the years, Vincent ranked as one of the few who was capable of learning from a mistake. He tipped his head, mouth twisting as he acknowledged the undelivered ultimatum, and turned to Elena Pretoria. “Elder,” he said, when there was a lull in the conversation, “may I inquire as to our plans for the evening?”
“We have balconies,” Elena said. “I think you’ll be sufficiently safe from abduction there. And you’ll get to see at least some of the proceedings.”
Kusanagi‑Jones bit his lip. Abductions were one thing. He was worried about snipers.
To say that Pretoria house had balconies was akin to saying that Babylon had gardens. Vincent would have liked to go to the edge of the one they occupied, three stories or so above the street, and lean out to get a better view of the merrymakers. But Angelo and Shafaqat had other ideas; they kept their bodies between him and the street, while Lesa and Katya flanked him. Elena, Agnes, and the older man that Vincent had met at dinner were off to the left and slightly above his vantage point, and the rest of the household scattered about, above and below.
Miss Pretoria had been right. It was indeed a pretty good party.
The street that the balconies overhung was narrow, the buildings opposite lower and more rolling than the twisted spire of Pretoria house. And even three stories up, Vincent could smellthe mass of humanity below. Not just the liquor or the perfume or the crushed flowers draped around their necks and threaded through their hair, but the meaty animal reek of all that flesh pressed together. They moved like a many‑legged, meandering insect, singing and laughing, banging drums, playing portable instruments that were remarkable to Vincent in their familiarity–gourds and flutes and saxophones and kalimbas.
There were a lot of weird worlds, a lot of political structures based on points of philosophy. Not all the ships of the Diaspora had been faster than light, even; humanity had scrambled off Earth in any rowboat or leaky bucket that might hold them, and dead ships were still found floating between the stars, full of frozen corpses.
Vincent found it alternately creepy and reassuring when he considered that no matter how strange the culture might be, every single world out there, every instance of intelligent life that he had encountered, claimed common descent from Earth.