Flight of the Vajra (111 page)

“Cioran,” I called out, “you’re up.”

Cioran wrapped his fingers around the fretboard of
his polylute—all for show; he commanded the whole instrument via CL anyway—and
began to conjure not a melody but a set of images, much like the way he’d
populated the beach below our villa on Bridgehead with a whole complement of illusory
nighttime wanderers. Here, instead, he improvised nonexistent IPS troop
movements between blocks, jammed out corner-of-the-eye glimpses of what could
have been guerilla fighters sneaking from one yard to the next, and conjured up
fake empty streets to replace ones where our neighbors and IPS guards now crept
along towards the barricaded edge of town. All this dithyrambic fakery was
being pumped straight into the city’s sensory-surface infrastructure, from
which it seemed Marius and the Dezaki nodes were a little too reliant on
gathering their information. The trick would give itself away before long—it
wasn’t as if the Dezaki nodes couldn’t fall back to plain old eyesight and use
that collectively—but it would buy us enough time to confuse them, to render a
first strike, and to provide a bit of cover for everyone receiving my earlier collective
hello. A trick like this, I could have executed on my own with a few
specially-crafted functions—but I wanted a whole separate warm body in charge
of what happened, one fueled by an artistic improviser who could respond to the
situation with his own ingenuity, and not some algorithm that could be
second-guessed and dead-ended.

I let my senses inhabit the live city map—one
where I could separate Cioran’s trickery from reality—and immediately felt
movement all across its face like so many ants on my skin. Thousands of
home-use manufaxtures now had something to do, and when they fired up and began
spewing out portable riot shields and single-use tube guns, their activity
reached me like so many needle pricks on my chest. The members of each
household were automatically fed the locations the nearest Dezaki node
instances; all they had to do was open a window, poke a head out of a roof-hatch,
or otherwise take aim.

In the thousands of my ears that were made of
every sensory surface within reach, gunfire crackled. Here, a Dezaki’s head
split in half; there, a torso came away from its hips. From one window, a
wife-and-wife team unlimbered a slingshot (Type D/A-weave for the sling; type C
for the brace) and fired a human-head-sized blob of Type D glue that unfolded
like gelatin origami and enveloped the entire upper body of one Dezaki. It was
more than enough of a distraction for someone in the adjoining yard to drive a
gardening tractor right over him from behind. Those first few shots were soon
joined by the pattering roar of IPS guns, drawing beads on remaining targets
and finishing them off.

Over at the docks, IPS sappers planted charges at
the base of the wall behind which lay Marius’s dock. The explosion rained
tinsel and flash-melted proto-slag over half a block in all directions. Four
armored cars barreled their way into the hole without even waiting for the
smoke to clear.

I felt a thousand of my eardrums punctured at once
from the blast, but I didn’t back out. I needed to stay close and witness this
battle from as many different angles as I could:
There’s one still hiding in
the substrate flow control box below street level. There, that one just ran
into what’s left of that house—no, never mind, the one living there just pulled
the house down around him.

Down below and all around us, for kilometers in
every direction, I felt jets of substrate pooling and eddying in closer against
our newly-built walls. It all sent cold chills along my scalp and back. I tried
to reverse-trace where all those new formations were being commanded from, but
every trace died after one leap.

I had to force myself to remember I still only had
one body.

I let myself see through four dozen different IPS
eyes at once as they pushed into the landing chamber and crowded around the
base of the ship parked there—one which no longer remotely resembled the craft
Marius and the Prince had arrived in. It now resembled two spindly, rococo
pyramids, joined at their bases by a narrow conduit, with apexes at top and
bottom. Far larger than the ship they’d come here with, too— some thirty to
forty meters high and at least as long on a side. And the entire inside was off
the grid from any of my senses, until a platoon of IPS troops chewed a hole in
one side and eased their way in.

“Oh, look,” said the Prince. “Party-crashers.”

He was seated on a couch, in the center of a
platform suspended halfway up the center of the inside of the double pyramid.
The platform was anchored on a network of spindles and coupling links that
would allow it to revolve and face any direction. It took until two of the
troops were halfway up the spiral staircase that led to the base of the
suspended platform that I realized the décor inside—all of it hanging from what
right now served as the ceiling—brought to mind the crazy-quilt layout of his
palace, as viewed from above with the roof removed. I guess this was the one
place on the planet he felt safe making over in his own image, I thought.

Many of the other troops didn’t trust going up the
center steps. Instead, they fired off grappling cables to climb the insides of
the pyramid’s walls, which were lined with elongated nodules that couldn’t have
been anything but biers like the one Aram had been decanted from.

“Where’s Marius?” The guard now standing in front
of the Prince put that question to him, as two more troops behind the Prince
prepared to install a CL lockout brace on his neck.

“Why don’t you ask my lawyer? She’s the chatty
type.”

They started reading him his rights after they
lashed his hands together and lowered him to the floor on a cable. Most
conspicuous in that droning litany was that his access to his backups had been
suspended until further notice, and that any attempts to access them could
constitute evidence to be used against him—all of which he smiled on through as
if they’d been ticking off his bedroom conquests.

 “We’ve just broken through the vault wall for the
engine stockpile,” Kallhander told everyone on the main broadcast channel. “All
the engines from the
Vajra III
appear to be there. MacHanichy and the
others have ordered it be kept under guard until Marius is found
and
accounted for.”

I like how that was phrased, I thought. Just
because we find him doesn’t mean he’s going to be accounted for—not when he
brought with him the template for a standing army whose bodies he could
re-inhabit as long as he had the chance.

That reminded me to take another look at the
substrate current map I’d put together. Half ours, half his, with his half
still gliding around us in lazy currents. It was slowly reverting all control
back to us, but the total time to finish propagation was at least half a local
day. Between then and now, I thought, anything can happen, and we were still in
that twilight state of not being sure if an all-clear could be sounded. Until
that happened, it was probably best for me to keep my senses as
widely-distributed as possible—there might well be things that couldn’t be
detected any other way unless you had planet-sized eyes and ears.

Or a planet-sized sense of time.

The current maps, I thought. Don’t look at them in
conventional time. Play back everything as far back as you can get the data for—meaning
right around the time Marius landed and tore everything in half.

I turned off everything in the map that wasn’t
under Marius’s control and watched it spread and lace itself about. At first it
just spread as you would expect—like multiple balloons inflating outwards,
slowly crowding out everything else and choking them off into swirling, spiny,
ever-thinning fractals. But then the key revocation started, and those balloons
splintered into the same sort of root-like mesh. They weren’t so much being
crowded out by the currents of revoked-key substrate as they were interlacing
around
them, using artificially-created currents to minimize the amount of interaction
between what was his and what was ours. Marius, wherever he is, was directing
all of it somehow.

Hello, Henré,
something said.
It seems you’ve bumped back into me at last.

—
Marius?
I shouted back at wherever that
voice had come from. From everywhere at once, it seemed. Inside me, too, which
made it all the more sickening.

That was a very
sly bit of resistance you orchestrated. I was wondering what cracks you and
your friends would dig their fingers into. I didn’t expect it to be in the
telemetry protocol, of all places. For once I’m not disappointed.

—
Does it chap your ass to know your own Dezaki
nodes sold you out? And for Angharad, no less?

Why do you
assume that was a sellout? Because the information they provided you with turned
out to be valid? That requires another assumption on your part: that I cared
whether or not you getting in the way actually mattered to me by then. I’m at a
stage where everything off-planet is no longer something I need to protect all
that dearly.

You see, I’ve
made a discovery—and not the discovery I was looking to make, which makes it
all the more interesting. When the first capitulations started coming in, I had
to admit Angharad had been right about one issue. having everything you can ask
for
is
rather boring.

That and having
you all out of the way was only the first step. What then?

That made me
think about Aram Dezaki’s method: multiple, simultaneous, parallel
incarnations. I rather liked the idea myself, until he inadvertently pointed
out how it didn’t solve the underlying problem: there may be that many more of
you, but that only increases the number of opportunities for you to be put into
conflict with others, and thus not get what you want . . .

A good thing I hadn’t been paying full attention
to him gabbling. Somewhere in the deep far below where my senses could
immediately reach, I felt something stir and rush upwards.

. . .
And while he made some major inroads towards resolving inconsistencies of
experience between nodes, it wasn’t more than just a postponement of the core problem—that
there can only be one of you in a given place unless you’re under the direct
command of someone you authorize as a superior, and thus remove from yourself a
good deal of the autonomy that was the whole point of such an exercise.

My conclusion: it’s
best if there’s only one of you, anywhere, for all time.

I don’t want to
have everything I could ask for anymore. I think I am beyond that stage. I
think I would rather
be
everything I could ask for.

No, let me
amend that further. I think I would rather
be
everything, period.

Starting right
here.

And with that the whole city shook.

Marius’s meshwork
of substrate rivers
had crawled up the outside walls of the city and were busy severing, sawing
through and choking off all of the anchors and struts that kept it from floating
freely in that ocean below. The surrounding ocean clouded over with slag from
his efforts.

I tried to actuate my own veins of substrate and
entangle his with them, like so many fingers interlacing and maybe breaking
each other—but I should have been trying to do that minutes ago. By the time I
had enough of them instantiated to make a difference, he’d already cut the city
loose from its moorings and was raking his thousands of ribbed steel fingers
along its sides, slowly rolling it. The whole of the city tilted, and the
ground rippled like a waving flag.

It only came to me just then to pay attention to
what was happening to my body.

I came back to physical space for a moment. The
common room had turned on its side five, maybe ten degrees. I’d gone flat on my
back against the edge of a doorway. Enid, facing me, was hanging by the
opposite side of the same doorframe by her fingers, almost smacking me in the
face with her feet.

“Get your ass downstairs!” I shouted at her. “Get
in the damn vault!”

“Not without you!” she shouted back.

Something giant and dark (an IPS troop transport?)
flashed past a window; a moment later there was a ripping crash as it
ostensibly smacked into a house in an adjoining lot. Another moment later our
own house shook even more violently as something else at least as large smashed
into it and caused most of the ceiling to bulge downwards towards us.

I cursed myself for not having her go down with
the rest of them, but I’d been so preoccupied with the world below and above
that I’d forgotten about the few bits of space and flesh around me. And, I
suspected, everyone else simply thought we knew what we were was doing.

Enid acted before I did. She tore open her leg
pocket, snapped open the p-knife—too late to worry about whether or not it was
bugged—and used it to drill as deep as it would go into the top of the beam she
clung to. Half of the blade, anyway: she’d kept the blade separated into two,
the other half attached via the lanyard-like wire extrusion she’d used before.

All right, I thought, maybe she
did
know
what she was doing.

“Catch!” She tossed me the other half of the
p-knife. I caught it and followed her example, pinning the blade into the top
of the beam. If nothing else we could stay anchored to where we were—as long as
the building’s own skeleton wasn’t pulled apart by the tremors shearing through
it. Trying to reach the vault might get us killed faster than staying put, and
I didn’t dare turn on the Escapist for fear of crippling myself.

I brought the substrate map back into focus and
cursed. My fault for not looking more closely, I thought. Those eddies and
currents of substrate under Marius’s command weren’t just free-flowing
rivers—they flowed around (and through) flexible central cores, long tubes
instantiated out of segmented rings of Type B and C. They looked a little too
familiar for my own comfort.

I had just time enough to register how they were
revised versions of his squirmers when a whole crop of them smashed into the
dome along the underside of the city and began chewing their way in.

No professor in any of my protomics engineering
courses would have ever come up with a puzzle this sadistic.
You have an
enclosed, populated city fed by a subterranean substrate reservoir—oh, but
there’s been an earthquake which has tripped all the fail-safes, so you can
only use what you already have topside. Everything below, you don’t have any
power source for; that’s now been disengaged too thanks to the enemy banging on
the walls outside. Oh, and because of all that, anything you do with what you
have in your reservoir is only going to be at a 30% efficiency ratio since
you’ll be slagging around two-thirds of your substrate just to make use of its
ambient power, that being the only way you can get anything done with it in the
first place. You have five minutes to not die. Good luck.

Well, I told myself, start
somewhere.

The squirmers had already started chewing their
way into the dome surrounding the city’s substrate reservoir, so I let the outermost
strata of the dome itself pinch down around the collar of their scolices and bite
their heads off. End of Standard Protomic Defensive Maneuver #1. But I knew
that was nothing more than a defensive move; I had to find a way to take the
fight to Marius. Wherever, and whatever, he was. That and I knew I could only
continue to do anything as long as there was enough ambient power in the
substrate reservoir and in the surfaces around us to keep communications up and
running.

The floor of the common area creaked and buckled.
It felt like each half of the house—or each half of the whole city—was trying
to walk off in a different direction. I shut my eyes and concentrated, but it
was twice as terrifying to do that with my eyes closed. If something was going
to fly out and brain me, I wanted half a chance to see it coming.

I have to say,
it’s nice to not be so constrained by gravity. Can you say the same?

I laced a thousand of my own protomic fingers
around his and yanked. The turning of the city stopped, but didn’t reverse; I
didn’t have enough leverage. I’d instantiated squirmers of my own, but my need
for haste was working against me—I’d done it fast enough and with such abandon
that I feared half of them wouldn’t even instantiate correctly to begin with,
or would simply end up fused into immutable lumps of slag. And worse, each
counter-action I made simply sent that many more opposing shock waves through
the city. I, of all people, ought to have known something that big couldn’t be
turned on a dime.

My senses are still operating on the wrong scale,
I thought. Especially my sense of time.

Marius dug a hundred new fingers into the wall
nearest the engine vault. All he had to do was poke a hole in it and the
contents would fall out into his hands, like fruit drops from a jar.

The total
complement of engines here is more than enough to create a vessel out of us. One
plenty large enough to provide the focus needed for the sort of solar
triggering you’ve already witnessed once close-up.

I shoved a hundred fingers into the hole, sealing
it over. For once, working with protomics too quickly had worked
for
me:
they all fused into slag, closing over the opening. I swatted him away from
every surface where he drew closer, but there were still only so many of me,
and just too many of him. I started flooding the engine vault with substrate
from my reservoir, embedding them all in a mass of tubular extrusions like so
many meatballs inside someone’s intestines, and began yanking everything out of
there all in one go. I didn’t know where I was going to put them; I just knew I
couldn’t leave them as-is.

As soon as you
quit fighting, your engineering expertise will be invaluable in learning how to
add other worlds and their populations to my matrix. I have to say, Arsèni
wasn’t half the genius you are, but he
was
a good deal more . . .
pliant.

The city creaked and rolled in what now felt like
five
directions at once. If Enid and I hadn’t been stapled to our respective support
beams, we would have fallen into the well that was now the common room. The
floor-extruded table bent under its own weight and broke loose, smashing into
the wall below and embedding itself there. If we don’t all just fall out into
the sky, I thought, the city’s going to rip itself in half from all the seismic
stress of being turned on its side.

I tried to patch into the house’s own
infrastructure and got back a hash of conflicting response signals that told me
I might do as much harm as good if I tweaked anything—not that most of what I
could reach had anything beyond ambient power left anyway. I could pass signals
back and forth to whatever was outside, but that was about all, and I didn’t
imagine even that would last much longer. The vault in the garage was at least
still sealed, but I didn’t want to think about the beating everyone inside was taking.

And then I felt another rumbling, a different kind
of tremor from a new source.

Water, whole newly-forming rivers of it, gushed
past the house on both sides. The artificial lakes had spilled over, of course.
From everywhere at once I heard a colossal groan, like I was an ant listening
to creaky floorboards.

Something slammed hard into the whole of the house
from above, and the beams we were hanging on began to skew downwards. For all I
knew another house, uprooted and flying free, had hit us hard enough to do it.

I brought my concentration back to bear on the
ocean around us. I could burn substrate from our stockpile to set us aright, or
I could burn at least as much to fight back directly against Marius’s
million-and-growing limbs. Or I could attempt to do both at once, and have both
fail for being underpowered.

The wall far below us, now our floor, also started
to split. Behind it was nothing but the abyss of the yard outside, now a
mudslide laced with rubble. Above us was only the doorway into a corridor
leading left and right, which was also rapidly coming apart. We could climb,
but we’d be climbing right into a burgeoning avalanche; if we fell, we’d fall
and fall and fall.

If I don’t right this ship at least partway, I
thought, I’m dead, and the whole issue will be moot.

What did you
hide the engines for, Henré? I would been happy to take them and go. Now you’re
going to have to bear the responsibility for so many more dead.
Marius’s
signals continued to reach me from what felt like every direction at once.

I put everything I had into turning the city. All
I did was create rivers of slag and tinsel that eddied around the squirmers
near what had once been the side wall of the city, but was now its top. There,
they once again began drilling away in earnest.

I can save you,
you know. You won’t be as you are now, but you’ll be saved all the same.

Telemetry from the reservoir, which was already
getting spotty, told me I had around half of my substrate left.

There’s no
sense in martyring yourselves, Henré. Is being nothing really better than
living as a part of me?

—
Since when is it a zero-sum game?

Doesn’t
everything change for reasons beyond its control anyway? I thought Angharad
said something similar once.

—
If she did, she said it a whole lot better!

I wasn’t paying attention to his answers so much
as I was trying to see the shifts in impulses going through the nest of
interconnections all around and below the city as he replied. It confirmed
something I had suspected all along. There was no central node that was Marius
anymore, no one incarnation. That jumble of conduits and tubules that were
sucking up and spewing out substrate, those ganglia of squirmers and the
currents of raw material they glided through—all of those collectively
were
Marius. His intelligence was in no one part of that mass, but constituted the
sum total of it, a mind several kilometers on a side and growing, now made
entire out of Continuum’s special home recipe substrate.

Water began showering down on us from above from a
hundred cracks.

Down below, I felt Marius punch his way into my
reservoir and begin draining it dry.

Enid climbed on top of her beam and pressed her
face against it as the wall above us broke all the way open. Chunks of wall smashed
into our shoulders and backs like boxer’s fists, followed by more blows in the
form of a full-blown waterfall.

Another something, this one huge and dark—maybe
part of an outdoor shed—flew right at us and tore at my leg. I barely had time
to flinch from that before something else even bigger smashed into the
crossbeams adjacent to the one Enid clung to. It, and all the beams near it,
bent at angles so severe I couldn’t believe they hadn’t just snapped.

Enid shrieked as the beam under her shook. I saw
her—felt her, more like, as she was frantically sending me all this via
short-range CL now—as she kept her grip on the knife, only to have that yank
loose from the hole she’d drilled it in. The hole had split wider, no thanks to
the stress on the beam. She tightened her grip with her legs.

“Clothes!” I shouted. “Use the substrate in your
clothes!” I was doing that myself—trying to extrude something I could use as
another piton for additional support, maybe to staple myself to the beam. It
was sharp enough, but too thin—I would have needed to create a multi-layered
laminate out of it to get the strength I needed to support my weight. Enid made
the same discovery: she planted her impromptu stiletto into the beam and broke
it off the moment she put any weight on it.

I never
understood why anything was worth dying for. Better to find a way to live for
the things you adore, right? I think now that’s why I did all this, to learn
why people would do any differently. I confess, I’m disappointed.

—It’s because you can only learn about that
stuff from the
inside
!

Yet another something clobbered me in the shoulder
and shoved me sideways. A second later I realized I was dangling off the edge
of the beam, one hand on the knife and the other arm hanging down at such an
angle and radiating such pain that I was sure something was broken. There was
no fixing something like that hanging there, no matter what protomic gimcrackery
you’d been jacked up with. I tried to throw my legs back over the beam and got
one leg back up, but immediately slid off again and was pierced with such pain
I almost passed out. One more screw-up like that and I’d fall for real.