Flight of the Vajra (108 page)

Let us say yes to our place together in the
cosmos.

Angharad’s last words died away,
and I
let the shouting and cheering from outside wash over me for what must have been
a whole minute. I couldn’t tell if it was rage, joy, or solidarity I heard;
maybe all three, in equal measure.

I worked up a little more courage and took a closer
look at the crowd through the public sensory surfaces nearby. No, it was just
as mixed up close as it had been far away. Many wept, but not all were tears of
regret. From here and there throughout the crowd, then as one, singing began. I
didn’t recognize the tune—it wasn’t something I knew without having to look it
up, at least. And in that moment, sitting there next to Angharad, night breeze
wrapping around both of us, looking for the name of the hymn in question wasn’t
what mattered.

“Well!” Marius said. “That was bold, if nothing
else. But it’s not going to change a thing. They all love you entirely too
much, no matter what label you’re wearing. You letting them go doesn’t mean
they will return the favor. If anything it means they’ll cling to you all the
more.”

We didn’t bother to turn from the window to look
at his projection. Hearing his voice was all we needed.

“You know, I
understand
something now,” he
went on. “The first time we met, when you were riding in my car, with all those
security precautions on my part, I kept thinking I would find the whole thing
more satisfying than I did. It was disappointing, and I couldn’t figure out what
it was. Then you gave your speech, and it became clear why.”

It’s because you’re a fool, I thought, but you’ll
never admit that to yourself, will you?

“If you lock someone up, you make clear the
parameters of their lack of freedom. There are no surprises. You can continue
to deprive them of various things, but there are few surprises left. But when
you provide someone with the illusion of freedom—an illusion which they
themselves are conscious of—they will curtail their own options
automatically
.
They will
construct for you
the most viable system of control for them
that you would normally have to search for by yourself at great expense. Are
you listening to me?”

“Raptly,” I said.

“This is why things like hijacking someone’s CL
and piping in all kinds of agonies are, in the long run, a waste of time. Or
confiscating their weaponry and bolting them in a cell, or what have you. Yes,
some people break sooner than others, and they all eventually break if you wait
long enough, but you don’t want to break people. You want to give them an
opportunity to rethink their assumptions. And you do this by placing them in an
environment where they have many kinds of freedom, but where they know full
well those freedoms are entirely superficial, if not outright worthless,
because those people hold values that lie in different areas. You then give
them a chance to rethink what’s most valuable to them.

“It’s as I said before: destroying the
meaning
of
something is far more difficult, but also far more normative, than just
destroying the thing itself. And far more important. Physically destroying the
Old Way and the Highend and all the rest of that—it’s nothing compared to making
people no longer want them, isn’t it? And now that I’ve seen it in action, I
realize it’s far, far more interesting to watch
that
unfold than
anything else I could have thought up before.”

“In other words,” I said, turning around for the
first time, “what you’re saying is, why go through all the trouble of torturing
someone when you can just let them do it to themselves?”

“Henré,” Marius scolded, “I was hoping if anyone here
wouldn’t disappoint me, it would be you. It hurts to be wrong about that.”

He signed off, thank goodness.

“It’s done, then,” Angharad said. She sounded as
wounded and alone as her speech had been fiery and impassioned. “One circle
broken, and another formed.”

Everything I had been considering saying had long
since flown from my head, like so many birds out that same window.

“It is entirely possible we may never hear a
single word of reply from the rest of the universe,” she went on. “If those
indeed become my last words, I will be satisfied.”

“They’re not going to be.” That reminded me of
something I did have to say which wasn’t complete twaddle. “That last part of
your speech was aimed at all the Dezaki nodes, wasn’t it?”

“Not only them, but including them, yes.”

“Get this: I’m hoping he brought more of them with
him than we guessed. The more of them that hear it, the better our odds. I
can’t say
how
much better, but . . . ” I took her hand. “It
was a great idea.”

She let go of my hand to reach up and brush a
stray lock away from my forehead, again and again. I didn’t want to do anything
except sit there and let her do that for all the time we both had, but the
noises from outside swelled enough to remind me of the moment we were in.

“They can see us,” I said. We were some distance
back from the street and up a few floors, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from
getting a good look, public sensory surfaces or not.

“Let them see us,” she said.

I let her brush at that forelock a little longer,
then closed the window and opacified it. This time, when I leaned towards her
to give her a kiss, she met me halfway and didn’t stop there.

“The first of the Kathayas
were
actually not celibate,” Angharad said.

We were both lying on a mattress that we’d only
thought to extrude from the floor at the last moment. Without her wimple or her
robes to soften the contours of her body, she was all corners and angles. Not
that I minded, as I found myself running a hand across one of them or the
other: her knob of an elbow, her pointed shoulder, adoring them all because they
were hers and they were the real things.

“The third Kathaya, Tenzilo il-Soosa—he was the
one who began most of the traditions that have since been carried forward,” she
went on. “Celibacy was an experiment, to see if it made a difference in the way
the Kathaya was perceived. The difference was dramatic, to say the least. The
Kathaya went from being respected as a source of counsel to being adored as an
embodiment of a greater spirit.”

“That wasn’t the only thing that he changed, was
it?” My own memory in this regard was dim, and as always, I wanted to hear her
version of it.

“No, far from it. But it was among the ones that
had the most impact. To see another deliberately choosing to forsake what is
easiest and most human, that makes him seem greater than you. —At least, at
first it did. Over time, as you can imagine, it has lost much of its
significance.”

“So why uphold it?”

“I upheld it, along with the rest of the
traditions I inherited, because it was what was expected of me.”

“And now no one knows
what
to expect from
you!”

That made both of us laugh.

Then, more seriously, she shook her head: “No, you
are right about that. Now that all the old expectations have been cast off, I
have surprised myself as much as anyone else.”

You sure surprised
me
, I thought. Then:
No—not after Anjai shook my shoulder and told me to pay attention to what was
under my nose. I just didn’t want to believe it was real, or that it wouldn’t
come without a cost.

No question it will come with a cost, I told
myself. But you know now it’s a cost you don’t mind paying.

Angharad was speaking again. “Today, to sleep with
someone or not to sleep with someone—especially outside the Old Way—it is all a
matter of great indifference.”

“Unless you sleep with someone powerful,” I said.
“And then you’re a manipulator.”

“Even that idea is on the wane as well, is it
not?”

“Only among people who never cared about such
things to begin with. Like our friend the Prince, who hasn’t had a fixed body
in who knows how long. One wears out, he instantiates another. For someone like
that, sex is just another . . . biological habit. Something you do to
pretend you still have a body. But you can
bet
someone like him will be
the first to point and sneer at . . . well, you and me.”

“I am not worried about what others will say,
Henré. And I . . . ” She turned her head to look at me sidelong. “I
do not believe you ever did, either. You have feared what others thought of
you, but only because you refused to allow others to defend you as well. I
would not have done this with you if I did not feel I could speak of it with
pride. And you?”

I gave her another kiss—a slow one, on the
forehead, as if it were to be the first kiss I’d ever given her—but I knew that
by itself wouldn’t be enough of an answer, so I said: “I’d be stupid to be
anything but proud.”

She reached out and touched my eyelids. “You look
exhausted. You should rest.”

That’s partially your fault, I thought, but I’m
hardly complaining. Out loud: “I’m getting used to running on less and less
sleep. But if something happens, wake me up. The next half-day or so is
critical.”

I should never talk about stuff like that right
before bed, I told myself, but I always do it, and I always end up with a
headful of things to do. My head was still buzzing as Angharad sat up and began
to dress herself, and the last thing I remembered before nodding off was seeing
her pull on her wimple. It was a beautiful sight.

I didn’t dream,
and I didn’t feel like
I’d slept at all, either. Cioran was shaking my shoulder—I’d stupidly toggled
off all my links—and calling my name.

“I’m awake, I’m awake,” I called out as the blur in
front of my eyes cleared.

“Snoring awfully deeply for someone awake!” Cioran
frowned down at me and gave my shoulder another
annoying-supposed-to-be-encouraging shove. “And turn on your CL, would you? For
a moment I thought you’d dropped off the grid entirely.”

I plugged in via the pirate link. “Better?” I
said.

“Better by far. You wanted to be woken up if there
was news; there’s news.”

We kept up some mindless outward small talk while
he clued me in. He and Ulli had been wrangling the exact word choices for the
first of a few capitulation messages—“She’s trying to make it more officious,
and I’m trying to make it more neutral; you’ll have to break the tie”—while
Kallhander and Ioné had crafted and refined the key hijack sequence. It
wouldn’t just take back control of whatever was within reach; it would also
allow us to queue up and execute a whole slew of commands in batch right as we
took control. To that end, they wanted me to devise some things that could be
front-loaded into the system as part of the ambush.

“Good idea,” I said, “since there’s a bunch of
things I know we need to have happen as soon as possible. E.g., getting as many
people as possible into the
Vajra III
—aw
crap
! Marius has the
keys for that, too, doesn’t he? He probably dismantled it by now.”

“Eotvo believes so. Either taken over as-is, or
scavenged for the engines in it. Continuum actually doesn’t keep a large
stockpile of engines on hand. They instantiate them as needed from the solar
platforms.” He made an out-thataway gesture.

“Not like they need very many of them in the first
place. Plug me into Eotvo, I need maps.”

He plugged me into Eotvo and I got maps, and I
studied them while waking myself up with a little water on my face. Everything
they sent me was a static snapshot of how things had been allocated just as
Marius had been showing up in the Prince’s company—our little hometown here,
the parking garage there, Marius’s ship over yonder, all the various lakes and
reservoirs of substrate on all sides (and the great ocean of it under us). And
at least one area had been pre-allocated for storing entanglement engines.

Fine, I thought, but what can we possibly do with those
engines in the tiny window of opportunity we’d get once we broke the keyring?
We’d need orders of magnitude more time to evacuate everyone, and sneaking them
out of there a few at a time was out of the question . . . It was
only a few more musings after this that I realized I’d used the term
evacuate
,
and unthinkingly at that. But not unrealistically: if there was no way to
retake Continuum from its new owner, then what choice did we have for survival?

And just when this place was beginning to get a
little nice and lived-in, too, I thought.

Since escape isn’t a possibility, I thought, we have
to shift to a different strategy, one of resistance and containment. The second
part was straightforward, if not easy: either lock Marius in his ship or
separate it from him. He hadn’t brought all that big a crew with him—perhaps
he’d been counting on instantiating more of them locally, which could
really
work in our favor depending on the breaks. A global key revocation might well
work on them, too. Again, the less he knew about how things really did work
down here, the better. I didn’t like the idea of banking on him being
incurious, either: he was too smart to stay that way about most things.

The first part, resistance—that was much harder to
organize, but I had a few ideas. MacHanichy confirmed with me IPS’s local
instance had already been defanged—they had their guns, they were just under
orders to do as much of nothing as possible—so we couldn’t count on them for
any muscle until the keybreak went through. “But they know what you’re cooking
up,” he said, “and they’re looking forward to it.”

I told him the rest of what I had in mind.

MacHanichy blinked as if something was in his
eyes. “
That
,” he said, “is going to be entirely at your own risk.”

“
Our
own risk,” I said. “I’m just planning
to provide everyone who wants them with the tools to make a stand. You deserve
to know that ahead of time.”

“That’s fair. It may just be more difficult than
you think for us to accommodate something that . . . global. Just as
long as these people understand they’d be risking their own necks first.”

“Is there
anything
these people are doing
now that doesn’t involve their own necks? And ‘these people’ includes me, too,
you know—”

“All right, Sim, all right; point made. Just no
promises about what we can or can’t do. Frankly, we’re still divided between
fighting to save this place and just jumping ship, now that we have the facts
we need. We may not have the resources to do anything
but
run if it
comes to that.”

“Your Continuum friends probably aren’t too
thrilled with that.”

“Friend, singular; they’re all the same entity,
aren’t they? —Besides, they’re half-tempted to follow suit themselves and ditch
this place.”

I pretended this last bit of revelation didn’t
disturb me immensely, then nodded. “Stay in touch.”

I finished cleaning up and strode out into the
common area to find Ioné or Eotvo, whichever one I could get my hands on first.
No sign of them; they weren’t showing up on a location ping through the pirate
link, and I didn’t want to look for them “out loud” if I could help it.

Enid was on the couch, uncombed hair over half her
face, freshly bleary from sleep, but despite all that was studying that by now
very weathered piece of MemoCel of hers. She looked up at me, then nodded
towards Eotvo and Kallhander, who had evidently come back in through the garage
entrance, and they began telling me some out-loud cover story about doing a
neighborhood walk-around to make sure no one was panicking.

“Hey, Eotvo,” I said to everyone through the
pirate link, “what’s all this about Continuum possibly ditching out from its
own homeworld?”

Enid woke all the way up and slapped the MemoCel onto
her lap. The other three eased themselves into whatever seats were available.
For real they’re sitting down, I thought; to deliver
this
news, they
can’t be standing up.

“At this stage,” Ioné said, “we owe you a number
of explanations—”

“Oh, no.” Enid groaned that for both our sakes.

“—about Marius and the Prince arriving the way
they did. You see, they had been in contact with us for some time before
showing up. They made it clear they would be arriving in the guise of the
Prince’s envoy, and that we were not to interfere in any way.”

“Did you know about this?” I shot at Kallhander.

“No. I would never have permitted it.”

“But
you
had to know about this.” That, I
shot at Ioné.

The reply was tiny and plaintive: “Of course.”

“So all that grief you were showering on us
earlier wasn’t just about all that tough decision-making you were gassing off
about. You’d
already made those decisions.
You were just trying to get
some proxy sympathy for the
real
sell-out.” It’s not as if they don’t
have emotions, I thought; it’s that they don’t understand what emotions are
there for, or why you have them in the first place.

“Bear in mind, our plans to evacuate included you
all along,” Eotvo said, “but that, too, had to be evaluated in the light of our
earlier thinking. Meaning that, as Ioné told you, if we decided that our own
survival was paramount and that a mutual rescue operation was an unprofitable
idea—”

“—we’d be left to fry all over again.” Enid’s lip
was curling, even though she wasn’t speaking outside of pirate CL-space. “So
have you guys made up your minds yet about whether or not we’re worth saving?
Because the sooner I know, the sooner I can pack my own damn bags.”

“I agree with her,” Angharad said. She stood in
the doorway of her study, and I didn’t need to toggle back to real space to see
she was as livid as she got. “Why have you only told us this now?”

“We do want to make a decision.” Eotvo turned to
face her and stood up. “We want more than anything to be able to deliver an
answer, but we need stronger evidence that the plan as currently proposed is
viable. Our heuristics—”

“
Slag
heuristics!”

My shout made Eotvo swallow the rest of her
sentence.

Cosm alive, I thought, I’ve just
shouted down
all of Continuum
. That’s a feather for the cap, to be sure.

“Your heuristics,” I went on, “are the whole
reason you’ve wasted all these centuries, because they told you it was best to
do as little as possible. Just like the rest of the Highend, only you had the
excuse of being more ‘rational’ about it. You’ve been waiting this whole time
for—what, the
stars
to line up?” I should have laughed, but I shook my
head in dismay instead. “But you can’t be completely in thrall to that, because
you sent out Ioné and the others of her kind to test the water. And I think I
know why, now. The whole point of her, specifically, being out and around with
the rest of us was—it was to figure out some formula for things you can’t
reduce to a formula. It was the whole reason for her template, wasn’t it? To
learn how to take calculated risks in a singular way?”

“Nerve,” Enid said. “Guts.”

“Leaps of faith,” Angharad said.

“All those things,” I said. “All the stuff you
lost across all those centuries and didn’t know how to get back, except by
importing it from the outside?”