“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.
And now Katya was making Lesa pay for it.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
After their dead‑end conversation with Kii, Vincent had happened to be watching when Lesa appeared in the courtyard, whistled for her pet, and snapped a leash onto his collar. “Angelo,” he’d said, without turning, “follow her.”
Which was how Kusanagi‑Jones came to be slipping through the steadily increasing press of cheering, staggering, singing men and women behind Lesa and her animal like the sting on an adder’s tail, following the rest of what he took to be a long and somewhat complicated snake. Vincent remained at Pretoria house, nursing his sunburn and wrenched knee and covering Kusanagi‑Jones’s tracks, but the drop from their balcony was only four meters and Kusanagi‑Jones could have done it without tools, stark naked and on a sprained ankle.
Fully equipped, he could almost take it as an insult how easy escape had been.
Robert’s decampment was more interesting, and Kusanagi‑Jones was still trying to comprehend it. Based on his imperfect understanding of the layout of Pretoria house, the men’s quarters were isolated well up the tower and guarded. It was a descent that could not be made inobviously on ropes, especially in the middle of a festival, and if the guard had not been overpowered, the obvious solution was that somebody inside the house had assisted Robert in getting out.
Kusanagi‑Jones wasn’t surprised to discover that Vincent wasn’t sanguine as to Lesa’s involvement. Robert certainly wasn’t the only double in Pretoria house, and neither Vincent nor Kusanagi‑Jones wanted to trust Lesa more than necessary.
Which was somewhat ridiculous, given how much Kusanagi‑Jones was trusting Vincent. But at this point, if he wasn’t going to choose to trust Vincent he might as well go home, hand in his commission, and wait to be surplused. For the first time in his life, political and personal ideals were aligning, and if that wasn’t worth dying for, he was in the wrong line of work.
And so as they left the side street graced by Pretoria house, he dropped the camouflage function on his wardrobe as he stepped into a shadow, and stepped out again dressed to blend with the Carnival crowd. His wardrobe had no license of a mask, but it could provide something that would pass for a street license, barring inspection–and, it being Carnival, there were a lot of men on the thoroughfares. Though Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t think he’d have cared to try it any other time of year.
The moderately illegal modifications to the cosmetics subroutine he carried–under Cabinet seal, as patching a wardrobe was beyond even Vincent’s skills–made it easy to change his skin tone and alter his facial features. Programs for haircut, color, style, length, and texture came standard.
He couldn’t do much about his height–beyond heeled shoes–or his build, and those were distinctive enough to cause him worry. Fortunately, Lesa Pretoria was either stringing along any potential tail, or she just wasn’t very good at spotting one. She knew what she was supposed to do–the techniques were there–but the application was crude. And even had she been more accomplished, she was hampered by the animal that accompanied her. An animal that was going somewhere.
The streets filled as sunset approached, the air growing heavy with perfume, food smells, and the slightly rancid aroma of flowers fermenting in their garlands. Kusanagi‑Jones saw khir other than Walter, some of them accompanied and some of them alone, all moving with a sense of purpose that reminded him of footage he’d seen of Earth predators. Moreover, all of them seemed to be treated with a casual respect that surprised him. People and vehicles granted the khir the right of way, to such a degree that Lesa made better time jogging through the crowd beside the animal than she would have on her own. Kusanagi‑Jones was hard‑pressed to keep up.
The game of follow‑the‑leader ended when Lesa and the khir turned off the main road down a curved, narrow, unpopulated street that Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t enter without becoming obvious. He hung back, waiting for Lesa to round the corner, and didn’t step into the mouth of the street until her silhouette slipped out of sight.