Carnival-SA by Elizabeth Bear

thought to turn and ask their warden for permission. Still smiling, she waved him forward. Vincent dogged him, and he couldn’t even be bothered to be offended when Pretoria called after him, “Don’t touch!” although he did growl something about being housebroken, under his breath.
    He folded his hands ostentatiously in the small of his back, and tried to remember not to hold his breath. There were pieces here Michelangelo couldn’t even name, although he had—many years since—taken a class in the treasures that had been lost during Diaspora, and he’d chipped all the relevant records before he left Earth.
    Vincent leaned over his shoulder, breath warm on his ear, resting a hand on his shoulder where the skin of his fingers could brush Michelangelo’s neck. It was scarcely a distraction. He paused in front of a case with a long, chain-linked silver necklace, as much sculpture as it was jewelry, hung on a display rack like a barren branch. His chip told him the name.
    “Matthesen,” he said, pointing with his chin so as not to give Pretoria an excuse to shoot him. “ Fear Death by Water . Supposed to be lost.” He knew the white marble miniature of a nude and pensive woman beside it without help. “Vinnie Ream Hoxie’s The Spirit of the Carnival . These must all be North American. That’s Jana Sterbak’s The Dress —”
    Vincent didn’t even comment on the power required to keep the lights that shimmered words in archaic English burning across the wirework form. “That’s art?”
    “Heathen,” Michelangelo said, more fondly than he intended. “Yes, it’s art. And oh…”
    It caught his eye from across the room, a swirl of colors that seemed at first an amorphous form on a starry field, a nebula in dank earthen green and mahogany. A heavy tentacled brown arm reached from the upper left-hand corner of the canvas, shoving at the sky like an oppressive hand. Michelangelo gasped with the power of it, the vault, the weight, the mass . Just paint on canvas, and after he practically ran across the room to it, it shoved him back a step.
    Vincent, who had followed him, swallowed but didn’t speak.
    “The Lawrence Tree,” Michelangelo said. He didn’t need to look at the plaque. “Georgia O’Keeffe.”
    “I’ve heard of her,” Vincent said. He almost sounded surprised. “What’s this one?”
    Michelangelo didn’t know. He waved a question at Pretoria.
    The warden came to them, as if reluctant to shout now that they were thick in the spell of the gallery.
    “Saide Austin is the artist,” she said, and Michelangelo took a moment to appreciate the irony of a woman named after a city named after a man. “It’s called Jinga Mbande .”
    It was wood, Michelangelo thought, darkly polished, the image of a well-armed woman with upthrust breasts pointed like weapons, the strong curve of her belly hinting at fecundity. She held a primitive firearm in one hand, a spear in the other, and had the sort of classically African features that were rarely even seen on Earth anymore. “An Amazon heroine?”
    “A freedom fighter,” Pretoria said. She stood silent on his left hand as Vincent waited on his right, and they all breathed in the silence of the rich gleam of light on polished wood. The air was cool and smelled faintly of lemon oil.
    “Old Earth history,” she said then, and stepped away as if she needed to cut the camaraderie that had almost grown between them. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the friezes.”
    They went. Up a spiral stair— neck-breaking-type, Vincent mouthed at him as they climbed—to the third and final gallery. As they reached the landing, Miss Pretoria about a dozen steps ahead of them, Kusanagi-Jones leaned forward and whispered in Vincent’s ear, “If this is where the marines were killed, was Montevideo’s comment a veiled threat?”
    Vincent coughed. “Pretty well-cursed veiled.” And then he looked up and fell silent. Kusanagi-Jones hadn’t been prepared to be struck