Flight of the Vajra (12 page)

There was no debating any of that, especially
given the source. Who argues the alleged wetness of water with a fish?

“As far as being labeled as criminals go,”
Angharad went on, “there is something I can offer you that should help,
entirely at your discretion. Any vessel that carries the Kathaya is
automatically by law—both planetary and interplanetary—protected by diplomatic
sanction and is immune from search, seizure, confiscation, impound or
restriction of movement.”

“
Any
vessel?” That was Enid, beating me to
it.

“Any vessel.”

I shook my head. “Your Grace, that loophole’s not
gonna last forever. What happens when you step off?”

“It’s not a question of remaining on board. If I
designate this vessel as mine, officially, that is all that’s required. Its
designation remains until I choose to revoke it.”

She looked at my face and didn’t need even two
seconds to see that I was struggling with the weight of what she was offering.

“You did save my life,” she insisted. “With this
you might well save someone else’s. Hers, for instance.” She nodded at Enid,
who looked like she was about to say:
Since when did I need saving?

“I need to think about it,” I said, wincing at the
words. Some part of me felt downright irresponsible for not simply telling her
Yes!
or
No!
right then and there.

“Think about it as long as you need.”

“Well, I can’t think about it for
too
long.
We need to make planetfall pretty quickly or our version of what happened won’t
mean squat.”

Enid swung one foot over the side of her couch,
set it on the floor, and stood up. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” she
said, “but I’m starving.”

Nice way to back out of the discussion, I thought,
but now that I let myself notice, my own stomach was folding in on itself
pretty hard. I stood up and allowed the galley to emerge from the starboard
wall.

Even after all these centuries,
spaceship convenience cuisine is still nothing you want to eat regularly. Sure,
you can put together reasonably healthy meals with the latest versions of what’s
designed for long-term storage in a ship, and you won’t die of either
malnutrition or obesity. But after a week you’ll be bored, and after a month
you’ll be sucking at the corners of fixtures for a taste of something different.

I’d had the foresight to keep the
Vajra
well-stocked, and so there were enough convenience meals to feed all three of
us on a schedule of five meals every two days for about a solar week. After
that, though, we’d have to park somewhere—and since it took anywhere from one to
three solar days to put in planetside after making an entanglement jump, we
needed to decide where we were going
now
. I did a little more math and
figured I could go down to one meal a day if need be. You could cheat gravity with
a ship’s repulsor field, and you could (sort of) cheat the speed of light itself
with the entanglement engine, but you couldn’t cheat your own body for long—and
you sure couldn’t eat the furniture or the hull. The only real way to cheat
your body was to become the highest of Highend and do without a body in the
first place.

On the plus side, it wasn’t as if anything I could
offer Angharad had ethical implications. All the meats, from the chicken breast
gumbo and beef teriyaki bread bowl to the tri-fowl meatloaf selections, were
all lab-printed and -grown. Not like convenience cuisine would ever include
live-harvested meat in the first place. No one with blue-ribbon Old Way
credentials would come near a meal for which a living (thinking, feeling)
creature had been slaughtered. The only ones who did such things were the
Highenders who were only too happy to know they could fill hectares of land
with life forms that would go nowhere but into their mouths.

Call it spurious guilt, I guess: sitting there in
front of the Kathaya, I couldn’t even bring myself to reach for anything but
the barley stew with tomato sauce. Guilt, or maybe atonement of a kind for the
indifferent way I’d eaten these past few years, where I had in fact dined on
genuine meat from time to time. But then I saw Angharad take the pork ravioli,
and Enid snapped up the barley stew before I could reach for it anyway. I settled
down with mahi salad and crackers instead, and set to work getting us on
course. The
Vajra
had been able to triangulate our position without
delay, and so Kathayagara was seven jumps from Cytheria. We could shave that
down to five if we were desperate.

Traveling via entanglement engine was a great way
to beat the speed of light, but it had some annoying pitfalls. You could only
jump so far at any one time without running the risk of the entanglement lock
from your target star decohering on you—something planet-side gravity also had
a nasty tendency to exacerbate, along with many kinds of cosmic phenomena. That
also meant anyone who’d tried to go beyond an irregularly-defined corridor
within the galaxy, or leaping to a star that might not be even there anymore,
was punching a one-way ticket. The obvious effects of radiation even far below
the threshold for endangering life, or the unexplained effects of voids between
stars larger than a certain space, both proved to be deal-killers. And most
crucially, with each jump you made, you always arrived at some random point within
a sphere a few light-seconds across (they don’t call it
quantum
entanglement for nothing), with your final destination at its center. There was
no known way of shrinking down the minimum volume of space required for the
spontaneous manifestation of the virtual particles needed to complete the jump.
Call it the trillionth-mile problem: we’d mastered flipping ourselves halfway
across the galaxy, but it was still a pain in the ass to get into and out of
the garage.

The universe had looked down on our brave attempts
to buck the odds, smiled, and said,
That’s nice. But enough already.

On the plus side, that last limitation made all
those feverish interplanetary war scenarios all but impossible. Those who’d tried
it quickly found the lack of accuracy, plus the distances and speeds involved,
made spaceborne attacks impractical. What few wars that had erupted had been
about whoever had the most to throw at an enemy, and those battles all ended
with everyone left over realizing how dumb and wasteful the whole enterprise
had been. Hence, the mutually-agreed-on charters of the IPS to keep the peace;
hence, the shift from full-blown shooting war to subtler, more inevitable
means—like blackmail, or sabotage, or just the slow slide of the Old Way worlds
into irrelevance at the hands of the Highend. Why blow your so-called enemies
up when you could just outlive them, or wait for them to
become
you?

 I brought my attention back to the map. Assume an
hour or so between jumps for re-triangulation, and we’d be within the stellar
neighborhood within half a day easy. No danger of us starving, and there seemed
little risk of Enid going for Angharad’s throat again.

But the way their last conversation had trailed
off continued to bother me for no reason I could single out. Something about
the way Enid looked at the other woman now—it was like a dialed-down version of
her original anger and disappointment. Maybe she’d shucked off the largest and
most dangerous incarnation of all that emotion, but under that there’s
something else which smolders longer and runs deeper.

Well, if we were lucky, we wouldn’t have to stay
cooped up for too much longer. We’d put in at Kathayagara, let Angharad do the
talking, and take it from there. I’d probably never be able to go back to
Cytheria, even if the coup did fail, but it wasn’t as if I’d been planning to retire
there. The way I was going, I strongly suspected I’d be just as nomadic as
Angharad had flirted with being. If I was lucky I’d die of extreme old age right
here in this acceleration couch. Comforting thought.

If I was less lucky, I’d be caught in a conflagration
like the one I just ran from. And I might even take other people with me
without trying.

I finished my meal and tuned back in to what
everyone else was saying.

“Well, it’s not like most of us can afford to eat
real meat anyway,” Enid had been saying, whilewiping her hands at the little
extrudable sink in the galley. “Unless something changed since I left home?”

“’Nothing that drastic,” I said, still looking at
the course panel. I’d run a bunch of different possible routes, but I never got
more than a one-hop improvement, and I didn’t see a strategic benefit in
avoiding any particular space.

“The fact of the choice has always mattered.”
Angharad had finished her meal and placed everything in the reclaimer. “The
first scions of the Old Way eschewed meat to show their respect for sentient
beings, but never insisted others follow that stricture. The Sixth Kathaya ate
no genuine animal products, but those in his Achitraka still did, out of habit.
Eventually they changed to a diet that matched his. My understanding was they
did this because they kept feeling like they were being glowered at when they
sat at the table!”

That brought a laugh out of the two of us.

“On the whole,” Angharad went on, “there is no
reason why men should eat animals except out of habit. We recreated the
experience of doing so synthetically, but there are many who still long for the
‘real thing’—not the meat itself but the cachet it carries with it. And that,
too, has been borne of our unexamined habits. Each time we started anew on a
planet, we were not really starting anew. We brought with us a great deal of
baggage we could not see, the baggage of our assumptions about what it means to
be human. To be human, we tell ourselves, is to defy the natural order in some
manner. Some of that is required for life, of course: there is nothing ‘natural’
about cutting a fingernail, is there? Or shaving? But still, over the centuries
we have convinced ourselves a great many things are required, or desired, when
they are nothing but the residues of our prejudices.”

She wasn’t trying to sound preachy, and I knew it,
but I felt myself squirm anyway. I tried pretending to be busier with the map
than I really was, but I wound up looking back over my shoulder at them.

“Sure.” Enid closed up the sink. “But you could
say that about a lot of things, couldn’t you? There’s a lot about the Old Way
that’s like that, isn’t it? It’s what you
choose
to do, because you
think it’s the right thing. And then one day you stop thinking it’s the right
thing . . . or you realize there’s nothing that kept you there in the
first place.” She put her back to the wall where the sink had been. “And so you
stop doing it.”

“There is nothing that says you
must
believe anything.” Angharad didn’t look ruffled. “If belief is cultivated in
the absence of choice, then it is not belief. You chose to leave the Old Way in
your own life and from your own circumstances. There is nothing dishonest, or
dishonorable, or even undesirable in that. Is it not better that those who
follow, follow freely?”

“So you’re saying you don’t need people like me
around, is that it?”

“Enid,” I said, and turned around all the way, “what
are you
doing
?”

Angharad held up one hand. “Mr. Sim, it’s quite
all right. The girl’s questions may not sound sincere, but I know they are.
After all,” and here her smile became downright playful, “it’s not often people
have the opportunity to remain cooped up with me for any length of time and ask
questions so uninhibitedly.”

Well, I thought, as long as
she’s
okay with
it.

I turned back around and decided to dig through
the last news feed that the ship had snagged before we left planetside, just to
see if I was missing anything. More of the usual stuff. The Rollain
terraforming project was still running at least fifty years behind schedule,
meaning at least two generations of Old Way emigrants wouldn’t be able to set
up shop there. More crowding, and that many more worlds with plenty of space
(like Cytheria) finding that many more excuses not to let people settle, or
taking payoffs under the table to let them do so off the map. Belmas and
Fatimai were bitching at each other again over which of their worlds had the
right to negotiate first-look deals with a couple of systems with mineable
rocks floating around at the periphery of Continuum space. And Cioran had
announced he was going to make random planetfall “somewhere very inappropriate”
in a couple of days for another of his on-the-spot concerts.

All of it was at least a day old, since data feeds
between planets took days to propagate across the network—and I couldn’t get
the most recent updates while floating out in the middle of nowhere, with no
repeater anywhere in sight. Nothing in the headlines about us, as you might
imagine, but I was dead sure that would change once we put into port and got
updated.

I reopened my ears and found Enid was at it again.

“—which is what I don’t get. When you prayed for
your two friends, Wana and Mimi—”

“Mimu and Wani.”

“—Anyway, when you prayed for them, was that for
them
or was that for
you
? Because if they’re dead, and dead is forever, I don’t
see them being able to hear any of that. What’s the point?”

“I prayed for all of us. I prayed
through
my memory of them, if that is a suitable explanation. Praying for them is not a
wish that they come back to life, but a way to remember their importance.”

“Fair enough.” Enid pushed away from the wall and
eyed the bathroom niche. “Mind if I clean myself off?”

“Sure.” I got up and marched her over to the niche’s
door. “Let me show you how it works; there’s a trick to it.”

I used that as my excuse to crowd her into the far
corner and mutter into her ear: “Will you quit
needling
her?” (I didn’t
care too much about being overheard. In fact, I preferred it that way.)