And the men knew which member of the household looked out for them, and they knew there were gentles and armed women beyond the door. Some women were frightened of men–hopelessly old‑fashioned, in Lesa’s estimation. Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn’t make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.
It wasn’t their fault that they weren’t women. And Lesa knew better than to provoke them, anyway. Like any animal–like the house khir that had been Lesa’s responsibility before Katya took over–they could be managed. Even befriended. They simply demanded caution and respect.
Which was something many women were not willing to offer to stud males, or even gentle ones, but Lesa found she preferred their honesty to the politics of women. An eccentricity–but that eccentricity was one reason why she would be the one to meet the Colonials when they came.
The reason besides Katherinessen. She was looking forward to that. She stroked the archway and felt House shiver its pleasure at the touch.
Some people couldn’t sense the city’s awareness of their presence and its affection. Lesa found it comforting. Especially as she considered the thorniness of the problem she faced.
Her mother believed in the process. No matter what, no matter how much wrangling went on between Elena and Claude, Elena believed in the process. In the New Amazonian philosophy.
And Lesa no longer did.
She stepped back. The wall stayed open and a warm breeze chased her, bringing jungle scents and the calls of a night‑flyer. She’d worry about the Colonials tomorrow. Tonight, she picked her way past the sleeping men, brushing a finger across her lips when her favorite, Robert, lifted his head from his arm and watched her go by. He winked; she smiled.
The boys’ quarters were at the back of the Blue Rooms. She pushed past the curtain and held her palm to the sensor so House could recognize her and let her pass. The boys slept even more soundly than the men.
None of them woke. Not even Julian, when she climbed over him and the yearling khir curled against his chest, slid between his body and the wall, and pushed her face into his hair as if she could breathe his rag‑doll relaxation into her bones.
Timeslip. Cold currents on unreal skin. The flesh‑adapted brain interprets this as air on scales, air tickling feathers.
Kii had wings once. Eyes, fingers, tongue. No more. Now, Kii watches the aliens through ghost‑eyes, tastes their heat and scents and sounds through ghost‑organs. No skin‑brush, tongue‑flicker, swing of muzzle to inhale warmth through labial pits.
The aliens are that. Alien. Unscaled, unfeathered. Tool users with their soft polydactyl hands. They totter on legs, bipedal, hair patchy as if with parasites. But after Kii has seen a few, Kii understands they are supposed to look that way.
Sudden creatures, and so strange, with their hierarchies and their false Consent that leaves them unhappy, untribed.
But they know combat for honor, and the care of young, and they keep the khir. And they know art for its own sake.
They areesthelich, cognizant of order. And that is new.
The ghost‑others think Kii’s fascination strange. But Kii is explorer‑caste, a few still remaining–still needed even among the ghosts–and Kii is not content with experiment, manipulation, analysis. The others may engage with cosmoclines, programming, reordering the infrastructure of their vast and artificial universe. They may manipulate wormholes, link branes, enhance control. They have mistressed power enough to manufacture entire branes–objects similar to a naturally occurring four‑dimensional universe–and learned finesse enough to program them. They have aspired to leave their shells and embrace immortality.
Nothing they are or desire cannot be made or remade on a whim. They are beyond challenge. They no longer evolve.
And yet Kii watches the alien curl around its cub as the cub curls around the khir, and Kii sees something new. Perhaps Kii is in need of a programming adjustment, but it is not violating Consent to wonder.
And things that are new are things that Kii’s caste is for.
On fourteen worlds, Vincent Katherinessen had never seen a city like Penthesilea.
The limousine they’d transferred into after the lighter’s splashdown came in low, skimming over the wind‑ruffled bay and the densely verdant forests that grew against the seashell walls of the ancient, alien city. The pilot was giving the emissaries the view; she brought the craft up on an arcing spiral that showed off three sides of the skyline.
Vincent leaned against the window shamelessly and stared. The structures–if they wereindividual structures, given how they flowed and merged together, like tall colonies of some sea animal with calcified exoskeletons–were earth‑shades and jewel‑shades, reflecting a dark oily iridescence like black opal or treated titanium. Vincent wondered if they were solar. The colors were suggestive, but could be decorative–though he couldn’t think of a human culture that would choose that color scheme or the chaotic, almost fractal architecture that put him in mind of something arranged by colony insects, Ur‑hornets or Old Earth termites.
No one really knew. As the OECC had reconstructed from its incomplete access to New Amazonian records, Penthesilea looked more or less as it had when the New Amazonians arrived–the only evidence of nonhuman intelligence that had been found on any explored world. There were four other cities, each miraculously undamaged and thrumming after centuries of abandonment, each apparently designed by an intelligence with little physical resemblance to humans. And each cheerfully polymorphous and ready to adapt to the needs of new occupants who, in the hard, early days of the colony, had determined convenient shelter to be the better part of caution, and who had not been proven wrong in the decades since. Arguments about their nature and design possessed the OECC scientific community and proved largely masturbatory. New Amazonia wasn’t about to allow a team in to research their construction, their design, their archaeology, or–most interesting of all to the OECC–their apparently clean and limitless power source.
So Vincent and Michelangelo were here to steal it. And if they couldn’t steal it–
There were always fallback options.
Vincent glanced at his partner. Michelangelo sat passive, inward‑turned, as if he were reading something on his heads‑up. He wasn’t; he was aware, observing, thinking, albeit in that state where he seemed to have become just another fixture. Vincent nudged him–not physically, exactly, more a pressure of his attention–and Michelangelo turned and cleared his throat.
Vincent gestured to the window. “Change your clothes. It’s time to go to work.”
Michelangelo ran fingers across his watch without looking, and stilled for a moment as the foglets in his wardrobe arranged themselves into a mandarin‑collared suit of more conservative cut than Vincent’s, ivory and ghost‑silver, a staid complement to Vincent’s eye‑catching colors. “Kill or be killed,” he murmured, his mouth barely shaping the words so neither the pilot nor the limousine would hear them.
Vincent smiled. That’s what I’m afraid of.
Michelangelo nodded, curtly, as though he had spoken.
The first thing Kusanagi‑Jones noticed as he stepped down from the limousine was that the pavement wasn’t exactly pavement. The second thing was that there were no plants, no flowers except the freshly dead garlands twined with ribbon or contack that hung from every facade. No landscaping, no songbirds–or the New Amazonian equivalent–just the seemingly wind‑sculpted architecture, buildings like pueblos and weathered sandstone spires and wind‑pocked cliff faces. He stood, tropical humidity prickling sweat across his brow, and arched his neck back to look up at the legendary Haunted City of New Amazonia.