Flight of the Vajra (107 page)

Eotvo called back up the keymap. “He does. That
was one of the first keysets we turned over.”

“Ah, pfeh. So much for that idea.”

“No, not entirely.” Kallhander called up the
keymap for himself and played back the projected propagation of Continuum’s
key-revocation. “The key escrow attack we can use won’t last for very
long—actually, it isn’t the
time
that’s the factor so much as it is the
propagation
between domains
. We can take back control of the communications relay, but
it will only work inasmuch as he doesn’t suspect anything. Delaying that will
require some work.”

Cioran covered his ears. “Non-technical language,
please!”

“I think I get it.” I said, giving Enid a nod. “We
create a fake capitulation message from some planet—Ulli, you could probably
help us make it look suitably official—and then right around when the first of
the
real
ones would be arriving, we revoke keys, hijack the comm relay,
and insert
our
message inbound. Then we capture all his traffic
outbound—”

“—and use that to figure out how to shut
everything off.” Enid’s eyes brightened. “I mean, it’ll still be a lot of work to
do that part, I imagine.”

“All right, I think I followed
that
,”
Cioran said. “Somehow.”

“A long shot.” Kallhander turned the keymap this
way and that, gloom deepening the crags in his face all the more. “It’s
unlikely he has the same revocation protocol for any two things. If I were him,
I would have created a key table and have each revocation performed with a
separate key, not a generic signal.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but that’s
you
. Marius
isn’t counting on someone else getting in that deep, is he? And from everything
I’ve seen, he’s clever, but he overthinks all the wrong things. He’s got the
door melded airtight, but he keeps forgetting people can kick in the windows.”

“If it turns out to be as simple as replaying an
outbound message,” Kallhander said, “I’m going to be disappointed.”

Cioran dangled his head down over the other man’s
shoulder. “If it turns out to be
that
simple,
I’m
going to be
singing and dancing! —Not like I don’t do that anyway, but you see my point.”

“I guess that’s your mission, Kallhander,” I said.
“You and Ioné work out the hijack and the replay. And we also still need to
figure out whether or not we can shut down his factory from here. I’m betting
he was anticipating a lot of resistance and planned on keeping it running for a
while, but you never know.”

They nodded and got to work. I stood up—for
real—and felt muscles creak and cramp that hadn’t done that in ages. All those
different fronts, I thought; all those myriad attack surfaces . . . one
of them had better give. And if they didn’t, it would fall to us to come up
with something else, even in the face of everything else in the universe being
held hostage.

MacHanichy tapped my shoulder in the CL space.
“I’m impressed and frightened at the same time,” he said. “You people are more
dangerous than Marius is.”

“I sure hope we are,” I said.

Tempted as I was to sleep,
I wouldn’t
let myself. I drank the local coffee and fixed something resembling a meal with
the fabbed provisions our hosts had stocked for us. I could have let everyone
else order up their own dinner, but staying in the kitchen and cooking something
for six people, myself included, kept my mind off the mess unfolding around us.
Only six, as Ioné and Eotvo didn’t eat, and MacHanichy and his troops were
doing a good job of outwardly spurning our hospitality.

Brown rice biscuits, lentil casserole, fabbed sea
bream (no meat here that wasn’t fabbed), and mushroom and bok choy salad—even after
staring at all that food for minutes on end I still couldn’t work up an
appetite. I put aside my portions, doled out Angharad’s on a tray, and brought
that to her study. Maybe it was best for appearances if we didn’t eat too
ravenously, I thought.

“I’ll eat,” Angharad said out loud, “and then deliver
my speech.”

“Mind if I join you?” I also said out loud.

“Not at all.”

Somehow, seeing her eat did the trick—maybe
because the way she ate just then seemed no different from when I’d first
shared a meal with her. The fact that there was a meal was reason enough for
her to be happy. Even when we had nothing but those vile little rations, she
was still happy. Even when she’s miserable, she’s still happy.

“How many of them do you think will give in?” I
said through our pirate CL link. “The different worlds, that is.”

Without hesitation: “All of them.”

“All of them? Just like that?”

“Just like that. One man alone can choose to say
no and die a martyr, but no society that exists now will choose such a thing through
their leaders. Their leaders always exist to preserve and continue what they
have been given the power to oversee. Even they know there is no courageous
example to be set here. I do not blame them.”

“Are you sure you’re not saying that just because
there’s some part of you that believes we’ll beat Marius at his own game and
make all this moot?”

“No. I am certain those worlds will do everything
in their power to avoid being destroyed. And all the same, I do not relish the
fact that it may well hasten the demise of the Old Way. If the Old Way were to
come to an end, it would be best for that to happen through each of us choosing
on our own to leave it behind. Not because we have all been blackmailed into
rejecting it.”

That answered my other question, I thought. “What
if someone does say no?”

I felt a chill rise when she didn’t answer at
first. It’s easy to forget she’s like anyone else, I thought; sometimes she too
has to think of an answer.

“I will lament their loss forever,” she said, “and
I will always wonder if I could have persuaded them otherwise.”

“Don’t you think they know you well enough to
understand you wouldn’t want that?”

“I hope they do. Because . . . I do not
want them to do this for me, or for anything. I want them to do this for
themselves. And yes, as you said, perhaps I only say that knowing there exists
a chance, however small, of overcoming this. I have the luxury of knowing that
little, where they have even less.” The corporeal Angharad put down her fork
with a sigh and spoke out loud. “I will ask if Marius is willing to allow
enough of a delay in his plan to allow my speech to be also transmitted to the
rest of the galaxy.”

I replied out loud as well. “He’s not going to let
that happen. Remember all his stipulations? ‘This, only this, and nothing but
this.’ He’s not bending that to shut anyone up, least of all you.”

“You know that I must try.”

I do, I thought. Not to win, but to simply not
have done nothing. But that was her: give her a wall, no matter what thickness,
and she’d put her head down and try to ram through it. Even if it hurt for me,
or for anyone else close to her, to watch her do it.

It surprised both of us, then, when Marius
actually answered her personally.

“I imagined you might ask for something like
this,” he said, “and to be honest I can’t think of a single reason, other than
my own ‘No’, why to not let you pass your little missive along to the rest of
the galaxy.”

Angharad, and I in turn, were both fumbling for
answers before he continued: “I mean, what’s the point on your part? You could
pass along a coded message of some kind, I suppose, but to what end? I’m
holding
them
hostage as much as I’m holding
you
, so what’s to be
gained?”

“I only ask that enough time be provided for my
message to propagate fully,” Angharad said.

“No. I’m not that foolish. But otherwise, feel
free. Say wherever you like. Your kind puts too much faith in words anyway.
Cosm, are you ever disappointing.”

He closed the connection as swiftly as he’d
answered it.

Undaunted, Angharad turned and sat on the small
couch next to the window. I slid back the pane and let the night air wash into
the room. Behind the containment walls installed by the IPS, I saw a crowd
pressing in, dotted here and there with the golden-globed lights of lanterns.

To all within
the reach of my voice
[she said]:

This is Angharad il-Jakaya speaking, whom you
have known best as the Fourteenth Kathaya of the Old Way. To all of you I bid
welcome.

I speak tonight to three groups of people:
those who have accompanied me here to Continuum, and who are now at the mercy
of the one named Marius Astatke; all those elsewhere who have followed me as
their Kathaya; and all those others beyond who knew my name, but did not follow
my path.

To the first, to those who are here with me
now:

You are not forgotten, and you are not alone.

You are my brothers and sisters, and when any
one of you is weeping I too weep. The fear you feel is the same fear that I
feel in my bones. I will not leave you, and I will not let anything part me
from you.

When we were first welcomed here by our host,
Continuum, I imagined there might come a time much like this one. And I said to
myself, “If such a time does come, I will offer myself first so that others
might live.” But I failed to imagine that we might be at the mercy of one who
would make such a trade impossible at best, and irrelevant at worst. Our captor
does not want martyrdom—not from any one of us, least of all I. For he knows
full well that one who lives under his thumb in agony is his slave, while a
martyr is free of him forever.

I will never ask you to martyr yourselves. Not
as long as I live will I command you to resist in my name. But if you choose to
resist, and choose freely, it should only be because you find more meaning in
defiance even at the cost of death than you do in life as submissives. And I
will do everything in my power to ensure you do not need to make that
choice—not so long as there remains within me the power to act first. And so
now I act.

To all those who have known me as Kathaya:

You have humbled me beyond measure.

Your devotion and selflessness, one and all,
has been exemplary, even in the face of terrible outside pressure to leave
behind the way you have known and loved. You have entertained great doubts, and
some of you have seen fit to let that doubt lead you away, to other worlds and
other lives.

I tell you this now: you too are not forgotten,
and you too are not alone.

The doubt you have known is mine as well. For I
have seen how the path we follow has become broken and twisted; how it has led
us further away from, not towards, our true nature; how it has made us despise
our neighbors and ourselves instead of greeting their presence with kindness.

I felt all these things, knowing only too well
I existed to perpetuate them. For years I sought a way to set that path aright,
from within. But I was as much an agent of its worst tendencies as I was its
best ones. Struggle as I might from within, there was no true change possible
from within. The only true rejuvenation of the path is in the building a new
one.

We who came here were preparing to build that
new path. We ourselves did not know what it would consist of, only that the
attempt had to be made. Even a failure of the new would be better than nothing.
Now we face having our search cut short from the outside, but this alone will
not stop us. As long as we remain in any form, we will continue to search.

I must now speak of two things that will dismay
many of you.

First: When our captors first revealed their
demands, I wondered if my authority had become a burden. Not in the sense that
is weighs too heavily on my own shoulders, but in that is weighs too heavily on
yours
. It has empowered a man to hold all of creation for ransom. I
would sooner divest myself of that authority than allow it to be used by
another that way.

Second: I have concealed from you, for some
time now, a fact about my abduction on Bridgehead. During that time, I was
implanted, against my will, with a cortical link module which was used as part
of the coercion strategy against me and my colleagues.

After my rescue, I was given the option to have
it removed. I said no. Or, rather, I disabled it first, and decided to postpone
having it removed until the time seemed proper. But then I realized: I, who
pondered for so long how best to leave the Old Way the better to create
something new—I have been given, by fate itself, a way to do this. In the eyes
of those who demand I be pure, I am now forever impure, and cannot be followed.
The impurity lies more with them than it does I.

[Cosm alive, I thought, she never did tell anyone
outside of our little circle about her CL, did she?]

Those who owe allegiance to the Old Way do not
owe it to any one embodiment. Not to any one person, since there are any number
of Kathaya before or after me. Not even to the Achitraka itself.
You are as
much the Old Way as they are.
The path is not theirs alone to make for you.

Nor is it mine.

Henceforth, I resign from and relinquish all claims
to the title Kathaya—

[Many faint shouts from outside reached me through
the night air like distant starshine.]

—all authority vested in me therewith,
spiritual or otherwise, and I call upon the Achitraka to appoint a suitable
replacement for my position at their convenience.

Those who wish to follow me in the search for a
new path are free to join. Those who wish to keep their old path are also free
to do so. I will never think any the less of you for keeping alive the light
you have always carried, with or without me.

You may say I have done this because I seek
attention at the expense of my former faith. I suspect a few mere words here
will not convince you. Let the rest of my actions, in due time, speak for
themselves.

And now I address myself to all and everyone,
no matter what their provenance or fellowship:

You also are not forgotten, and you also are
not alone.

Perhaps it seems strange for me to address
myself directly to you, since you might believe I have nothing to offer. Doubly
so now that I choose to speak only for myself and those who choose to follow.
But let me say this: I have no choice but to keep you in my thoughts as well.

In your worlds, and in your lives, you have
been the recipients of endless material bounty. Everything that could be
imagined by you, has become yours. And because of that, you are not constrained
by the limits of your technologies. Rather, you are limited by your own
imaginations.

On worlds like Bridgehead, you placed
yourselves at the mercy of others whose imaginations spellbound you, however
briefly. But soon you found what they dreamed of to be no less limited. Not
merely because you were asked to trade dreams of yours for their own, but
because you knew none of theirs would satisfy.

You have been given the gift of more life than
can possibly be lived, and it has become a curse.

You have all that could be desired—except the
end of desire itself.

You have conquered all there is to
conquer—except yourselves.

You are restless; you are bored; you are uneasy.
Worse, you must keep this restlessness and boredom and unease locked in your
hearts, for fear of what it might mean to admit to such things.

So I tell you this now: Heed the cry of your
own hearts!

Do not ignore your restlessness! Let it propel
you once again towards the same daring, the same bravado that inspired all our
first steps towards the stars.

Do not ignore your boredom! Let it speak to you
and tell you your real desires, which cannot be silenced by cosmetic changes or
the accrual of more and more from less and less.

Do not ignore your unease! Let it be the shock
for your awakening from slumber, so that you might know lives that are not
simply
existences.

I have come to cherish a certain motto, one coined
ages ago:
Nature likes those who give in to her but she loves those who do
not.
Some took this to mean all that mattered was to defy nature, once and
for all time. Perhaps, in their time, they were right to believe so. But they
forgot that it was
both
that mattered—both the defiance and the
surrender, together and apart, each to fructify the other.

The path I followed was meant to remind all who
followed it of this truth, but it soon became a means to its own end. It will,
I hope, soon rediscover its true meaning, through each of you.

None of you are forgotten. None of you are
alone.