Flight of the Vajra (114 page)

“In what sense?”

“Aram Dezaki is not merely a political refugee,” Angharad
said. “He has also agreed to become my spiritual student, for the sake of all
the others of his kind who have come to the same realizations that he has.”

“You could always call it ‘house arrest’,” I said.
“Or, ‘re-education’. You’re good at euphemisms.”

“I think I prefer ‘killed’.” Ralpartha’s tone
changed again, to that of someone merely reciting a manifest. “We’re also going
to demand that there be a moratorium on any discussion, publication, or other
circulation of information about Marius’s nova device. In fact, let me put it
this way: Consider that the rest of your price for allowing Aram to seek
asylum.”

Oh
, I thought. “Well, I imagine Ulli isn’t
going to be happy with that,” I said.

“This isn’t her decision to make and she already knows
it. That information belongs with us. We’re in the best position to monitor for
its abuse than any ad hoc committee of hers.”

“You have to know that keeping that stuff close to
your chest is just going to make people want it all the more!”

“Of course I know that. We’re not
complete
fools,
Mr. Sim. But even you have to admit the alternatives don’t work. Licensing that
technology universally creates a balance of power, to be sure, but a better
balance of power is created by simply preventing it from ever being used in the
first place. The disadvantages far outweigh any possible utility. Don’t tell me
you actually agree with the idea that it’s just fine to run off into corners of
the universe and incinerate whole systems just to see if it works?”

“And you have cosm knows how many laws against body-duping
and whatnot, but look what that got you: it got you Marius and Aram.”

“One exception to the rule amongst trillions? Then
I’d say the laws are doing their jobs nicely, Mr. Sim. Are you seriously going
to argue that one aberration—”

“An aberration where the whole damn universe was being
held hostage.” (I knew I was losing, but I went on anyway.)

“—is reason to throw the whole system out? Even
you don’t believe that. —You
could
always withdraw from IPS protection,
you know, if you find it so irksome. Find a world that nobody else wants to
bother with because of the radiation or the sheer uninhabitability of it;
there’s plenty of them. Carve out a bubble in a cave somewhere—much like this
one, actually!—or spin together an orbital colony. Set up solar harvesting and
autonomous protomic production . . . I hear some of those places make
it to two or three generations without falling over of their own accord. Or having
everyone leave because their emigration number came up—”

I broke in. “—or getting ripped off by the few
people willing to trade with non-IPS worlds at their extortionistic rates, or
dying of boredom. Et cetera, footnote.”

“Then you’ve been down that road too, I take it.”

“Until my feet got sore.”

“What is it you really want, then? You want
everyone to have both the knowledge of this thing,
and
the wisdom to not
use it? We don’t live in such a universe.”

“No,” I said. And then: “Not yet, anyway.”

Even if he hadn’t intended to do it, I thought,
he’d just given me a hint about what direction to nudge everyone in.

Ralpartha stood up and gave both of us little
bows. “The local IPS office will be obliged to forward regular reports about
your people, of course. And any responsibility for them will be entirely
yours.”

“I have already accepted that responsibility,”
Angharad said.

Still only half-smiling, Ralpartha left—leaving
behind Jainio, who looked wrung-out but calm at last.

“There’s a lot I could say,” I told him, “but
maybe I’ll just stick with ‘Thank you’.”

He nodded to both of us. “I should say the same to
you, Your Grace. You see, I suspected for a long time there were many others
among us who would have sympathized with your plan for some sort of reformation.
But none of them would have been willing to risk enacting it, or even providing
support for it. It was a . . . a nice idea, nothing more. What no one
suspected was that the schism would come straight from the top. I suspected something
like that was being hatched, even before she ever approached me, but
. . . I said nothing to anyone else, and—”

“Oh, no, don’t even go there,” I said gently. “You
go there, you’ll never stop picking at yourself.”

“But I wanted a reformation as badly as she did,”
he went on. “I just also knew I didn’t want to be the one responsible for
seeing it through. So, in essence, I wanted to
let
it happen
. . . and then step into the space you left behind, because I knew
you would not object to it being me in that space!” He was speaking directly to
Angharad now—pleading, better to say.

“Why are you so certain you would be the one to
succeed me?” she said. “If they wish to distance themselves from me, would they
not choose someone else, someone further away, as it were?”

“Because—” He pressed the kerchief to his eyes
again. “—because I allowed them to believe I
had
distanced myself from
you. They spoke of it as if it were true, and I did nothing to disabuse them of
this delusion. Now I must go back to them and live up to that. And they may
well choose me, if only because they also know I have none of your candor or
your will. They know I’m weak, and they want such a one now—the better to make
things happen
their
way. Can you forgive me, Your Grace?”

Angharad stood, and urged him to stand with her.
“I want to show you something,” she said.

We walked through a side corridor from the common
area, across the skybridge that had been added after the house had been
reinstantiated. On the other side—across the street, in an adjoining lot we’d
originally kept empty in the original city plan—was the common area for another
building, screened off behind glass doors. Like our common area, this was a
rounded room, but with a floor covered in ticked matting, one reminiscent of
the one in Angharad’s private study back on Kathayagara.

At the north end of the room, seated on an
extruded cushion, was Aram. Facing him, seated in rows and columns, were about
ten of the remaining Dezaki nodes that Marius had either brought with him or
instantiated planetside. I couldn’t hear anything, but it was plain they were
having a lively conversation about something.

“This being is my pupil,” Angharad said, “and
those others are his fellow students. All of them are creations, all designed
to be right hands to immature and confused people who wanted power. They have
done terrible things. No one has forgotten this, least of all I, I who have
taken them in as my acolytes. I trust them just enough to understand their
mistakes and strive towards repentance. So far they have paid back their world
admirably.”

Jainio stood closer to the glass and took in the
sight as Angharad went on.

“I think at least as much of you as I do of them,”
she said. “If you know that you are weak, then you owe it to yourself to return
and find strength.”

“After all,” I said, “you managed to get through
‘fessing up to us without melting completely, right?”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” His
voice sounded boxed-in and metallic with his face so close to the glass.

“And now you know how to handle it,” I went on.
“If you
know
they’re looking for someone weak, let them take you in. And
then see what you can get away with. Because if what you said back there was
true, you’re the only one who really understands what’s at stake.”

Jainio turned around, then bowed and smiled—however
shakily—to both of us in turn.

“Bring the wife and kids sometime,” I offered.
“They’ll love it here.”

The day after that,
Angharad and I
traveled, with Kallhander and Ioné as honor guards, to Lamia’s Light, where a
certain Barth Sulley was serving a sentence.

Fourteen days each way, during which time I busied
myself with plans: the
Vajra IV
; the new wards and neighborhoods for
Jakayagara (the city had a name now; I still couldn’t believe they seriously
considered naming it “Angharad City”); further analyses of the nova-accelerator
design Marius had been planning to use. We couldn’t pass that stuff around, and
we sure couldn’t make a functional implementation of it, but nobody could keep
us from studying it on our own.

Ulli was, as I’d predicted, livid about being
gagged and having half her life’s work yanked away from her by the IPS. At
least she now had something new to occupy herself with: piecing together plans
for a new summit to replace the one that had been aborted, possibly to held on
Continuum itself.

“The issue wasn’t whether or not they’d take it
all away from me,” Ulli admitted. “It was how long we could forestall them
before it was a moot point. I just never imagined what we would find would be
this . . . well . . . ”

“Eschatological,” Cioran suggested.

“Good way to put it,” I said.

The fallout from the schism was baffling everyone,
save Angharad. Over half of the Old Way adherents surveyed stated they
preferred to follow Angharad rather than the Achitraka proper. Thirty percent
or so said they would emigrate to Continuum if they were offered the chance.
The breach of contract lawsuit was quietly dropped, right around the same time
Ralpartha was reassigned to “an internal position”.

Angharad greeted all this with the serene smile I
remembered seeing from her a great deal more, once upon a time. She, like me,
had larger things to worry about—like what the ultimate form and purpose of our
new little society was going to be. One of the concepts she floated was that of
a “wisdom economy”—a university of sorts, except one that existed as an actual
society and not as a spin-off or enclave from same. There, we’d set old and new
side by side, see how they could co-exist, and make both the successes and the
failures available for all to see, learn from, and participate in.

“And to do this,” Angharad said, “will be a way to
look for the next and better set of questions.”

“Things like that always sound better on paper,
don’t they?” I said.

“I agree.” She seemed like she had been readying
herself for my skepticism. “But I am
just
stubborn enough to believe
otherwise.”

Same here, I thought.

At least I wouldn’t have to work too hard to come
up with an incentive she could wield for people to join her. The prospect of
spending any time at all in an environment like that—especially with
her
—would
be incentive enough.

And maybe, later on, we wouldn’t be the only such
place around either.

Kallhander drafted—and re-drafted, and
re-re-drafted—his resignation, which he planned to turn in upon our returning
to Continuum. “Ioné still feels a great deal can be accomplished in IPS from
within,” he told me, “and I don’t wholly disagree with her. They are not
terribly innovative unless someone goads them from within to be, and she wants
to be such an impetus. But the things I wish to accomplish now, I’m not
confident I can accomplish them there, even if she does embody the kinds of
change she wants to see. I suppose only time will tell.”

“In time you could both be right, you know,” I
said.

“Yes—that would be grand, wouldn’t it?”

Right before we departed for Lamia’s Light, Ioné
cornered me. I’d gotten used to the way her smile was sometimes nothing more
than a brave façade stretched over something wide and painful. It was like that
now.

“I’ve talked with Angharad about this,” she said,
without preamble, “and she convinced me you were the one who most needed to
hear it.”

I put down the cargo box whose clasp I’d been
struggling with and nodded for her to go on.

“When Marius’s attack on the city started,” she
said, “I helped Kallhander put Angharad and the others into the vault. I was
prepared just then to go back up and retrieve Enid, but I . . . I voted it
down. I went back into the vault with the others to keep them safe—”

“—because you thought,” I finished for her, “ that
we knew what we were doing.”

She didn’t nod, didn’t do anything except keep
looking at me. There’s more that needs to be said, I thought; I’d better say
it.

“But we’d thought the same thing too, you know,” I
said. “Enid and I, both of us. This isn’t just your mistake.”

“No.” She finally looked down. “But I’m going to
insist that my template be revised to avoid such things in the future. This . .
. may not have been my
mistake
, but . . . it is my
responsibility.
”

I didn’t have to tell her I knew exactly what she
meant. This time, she could see it for herself.

And then there was this little note that arrived
right as we were leaving:

Henré:

Looks like you lived up to a few other people’s
promises and then some. Figured I’d come by and bury hatchets . . . as
soon as they start allowing visitors over there. Shouldn’t be too long, right?

—Nishi

The new default bridge configuration on the
Vajra
IV
had four seats. But as I climbed into my couch and webbed myself in, I
realized I’d arranged the four seats in such a way that there was still space
between them for a fifth.

It was Marius, much as I was ashamed to admit it,
who had given me one of the key ideas for what the
Vajra IV
was to be.
He had wanted to make the whole planet into himself, and in the same way I
imagined taking the entire protomic ocean that enswathed Continuum and making
that
into the
Vajra IV
. The whole planet could be the ship. We could not only
take Angharad’s mission to as many other worlds as would have us, but bring
away with us as many as would want to leave—thanks to the little IPS charter
loophole of Continuum not having a population cap. A real alternative for a
universe that had stopped looking for one.

Cosm, it was difficult not to get excited about
that.

But I knew full well it wasn’t something we could
do right away. That was best thought of as a goal to grow towards, something to
approach on a path paved with each successive, incremental success we had in
our new world.

It was, after all, only an idea. Not a
plan
.

And so when we departed, the
Vajra IV
we
departed in was simply a copy of the core module of
Vajra III.
For now,
at least.

All of this had given me more food for thought
than I could properly digest on the way to Lamia’s Light.

Lamia’s Light is in the top one percent of worlds
as far as strict adherence to population quotas go. Every IPS-signatory world
accounts for its use of space, but it’s bothered more than a few folks that the
world with some of the most meticulous head-counting and resource allocation around
was little more than a debtor’s prison. The precise term was
work colony
,
where people who’d been fined into the ground for some civil violation—especially
on a world where there were far more civil than criminal violations—could live
and work off their debts in reasonably humane circumstances. They did a great
job of using the psych survey of each resident (not “inmate”) to make it just
uncomfortable enough for them to not want to stay, which was what kept people
from using it as a flophouse.

The subdivision we were directed to featured,
among other things, a tree nursery for exotic, hand-manicured breeds, and a
vineyard. Our visitation roster application told us that there was, indeed, a
Balth Sulley working alternating shifts in both places. That was, I guess, part
of how they made his stay unpleasant: he never knew, in any one given week,
which ten-hour slice of the day he’d have for sleep.

They let us meet him at the east end of the
nursery, where a little table could be extruded from a slab set in the ground,
presumably for meal breaks. We were seated there for him as he approached from
the north end of the field, the afternoon shadow of each tree flicking across
his face. He slowed his pace as he grew closer, and then after a moment stopped
walking entirely, just standing and staring.

I ran over to him. “Mister Sulley?”

He shook my hand, but all his attention was over
my shoulder, towards Angharad. Even at a distance of twenty meters with CL off
he had to be able to tell who she was. Most everyone could.

“Please come over and sit down,” I said to him.
“We’d like to speak with you a moment.”

I walked him over to the table like a child
tugging along a balloon. He could have been Enid’s older, more grizzled
brother—red-haired, taller, with heavier bones, but the similarity in the face
and especially the eyes was haunting. Doubly so given the way he couldn’t stop
staring at Angharad, and then finally bent low towards her across the table
once he was finally seated. Turned out his CL was working, just heavily
filtered and proxied, so no introductions were needed. In fact, he started
first.

“I heard that my daughter was on Continuum, Your
Grace,” he said. “Continuum, of all places! . . . Still, I was hoping
to visit her once I paid everything off. And before that, I heard she was in
your company—close to you—so I was wondering what had happened.”

“Angharad and I were friends of hers,” I said. He
didn’t seem fazed that I hadn’t called her
Her Grace
, but then again he
was already juggling so much astonishment that one more bit of it scarcely made
a difference. “She was with a traveling circus when we met her; she was
actually planning on leaving, and she ended up in our company.”

“Was she looking for me?” Balth said.

“She was,” Angharad said. “She came to me so that
we, together, might look for you. And so that you two, in turn, might go home
together.”

He put his head back down on the table and let his
shoulders shake. Angharad took one of them in her hand.

“She blamed me more than she did you,” she said.
“In fact, the first time we met, she . . . ” She made a swinging
motion with her fist, but Balth didn’t see it; he raised his head, blinking
back tears.

“Almost cocked her in the jaw,” I said. I couldn’t
help smiling as I did.

Balth let out a wet laugh and sat all the way up
again. “She tried to
punch
you? Oh, man, that’s so like her.”

“Oh, she wasn’t shy about rough-housing, no.”

“Did she ever tell you what happened the first
time she came back home from dance practice?”

We shook our heads.

“She tried to jump over a table in the backyard.
She clipped her foot on it and fell on her face and bit off a little piece of
the end of her
tongue
, and she was crying so much I thought she was
going to die right there. It was an easy fix, of course; those things always
are. But, still, all that blood . . . And that was our
joke
from then on, can you believe it? She would tell me about something she’d
learned and then right away she’d add ‘And I didn’t bite my tongue off!’
 
”

We joshed around like that for a bit more; I told
him stories about Enid sniping at Angharad all during our trip out to
Kathayagara. At some point I took out the MemoCel, and put it on the table
between us. “The gatekeepers here gave us some hassle about bringing this here,”
I said, “but they finally allowed it through. She had one like it; it was in
bad shape, and we copied everything on it over to this new one. I think she
wanted you to have it.”

He put his hand over it and nodded.

“I don’t know now why I wasted so much time chasing
you,” he said to Angharad. “It got easier to see that as wasted time after they
put me here. You have enough people around you telling you what you do is the
right thing, you don’t think about it. And then one day I woke up and realized
I was in a work colony, slaving myself raw because I’d stowed away on some
ship, and the only daughter I had in the universe was on the other side of it.
And I remembered every single time she’d begged me not to run after you, every
time she’d called me stupid, and I thought, they’re like steps on a ladder.
Each one was another step down, down, down, and it was me that had been doing
all the climbing down. It wasn’t like I’d been
pushed
.” He unfolded the
MemoCel and looked at the index, but it was plain wasn’t really reading it; he
was just giving his eyes something to do other than look at her and feel
ashamed.

“She wanted you to know she has always loved you,”
Angharad said. “And you are always welcome to join us when you have paid your
debts.”

He nodded, and I thought: She means join
us
,
not
her
. I hope he realizes the difference.

“They’re going to yell at me if I don’t get back
to work,” he said, and stood up. “If I ask for another bonus double shift a
week, I could get out of here a month earlier if my math’s right.” And then, to
Angharad: “I hope you can forgive me.”

“You have committed no sin,” she said.

We watched as he ran back to the north end of the
field, shooting glances back at us over his shoulder all the way.

We made
one more stop on the way back.

About two kilometers north of the Ulanjara River, a
brisk walk from where I once called home, is the cemetery where Biann and Yezmé
have placeholder plots. Neither headstone has a body, and I had paid a small
sum every year to reserve a spot between them for myself. The caretaker didn’t
seem surprised that I now wanted to have the plots relocated; in fact, he was
grateful that this gave him three more full-sized spaces.