Flight of the Vajra (25 page)

I stopped the simulation, then took the salvaged
pieces and created a mosaic from them, a fabric missing all but every fourth stitch.
If this was part of a single cell from a protomic substance of some kind, I
mused, everything harvested so far would constitute about one-fourth of the
total from each cell. Or the cell could be of some completely arbitrary design
that owes nothing to existing protomic cell configurations.

Come on. You have to start somewhere, I told
myself.

I zoomed back, assigned each cell an arbitrary
shape and configuration, zoomed back further. Nothing particularly revelatory
came to mind. A wall of cells whose macroconfiguration could be anything; for
all I know this thing was a bedsheet or a pullover hood.

Macroconfiguration. There were a few standard ways
you could control macro-config, and one of them was via voltage control from
the PRN. And one of the things you
couldn’t
encrypt was the amount of
voltage passed in such an operation: you had to pass that to the real world, no
exceptions.

Assume a standard cell shape, I thought—most
people, even someone building something of military-grade construction, would
start with what was known and what worked. If they’d come up with some maverick
geometry or topology, I was boiled anyway.

You have to start
somewhere
.

I started the simulation again, this time
inputting a range of standard feedback voltages into the PRNs and seeing what I
got back out. I didn’t start with much of a macro-config—a sheet of a thousand
cells on a side or so. The sheet twitched and undulated, but that was all. I
ramped up the sheet to a million on a side and got the same effect. Evidently
the size of the array wasn’t what made the difference.

There has to be some way to bootstrap this thing
into talking to its neighbors, I thought, or whatever it
thinks
its
neighbors are.

I worked on my third shot while trying to feed
something useful to the simulated sample. No voltage range seemed to make a
difference; no matter what I sent along into any one cell or charged the whole
cell array with (as per a solar module, which might well have been one of the
missing pieces), all I got was a vague twitching. Well, at least that was
something
—although
for all I knew the obfuscated code had been doubly obfuscated by the time they’d
scooped it up, and this was all it was capable of doing anymore.

I turned everything off and walked back into the
common area, bottle in hand. The only thing that whiskey had going for it was
its ferocity. It was getting dark out—at least, everything above the horizon
was getting dark. The city itself squirmed with light, and looking at it
reminded me how badly I wanted to get back outside and eat a meal (or, cosmos
willing, make one for myself) and pretend I wasn’t on the other end of someone’s
leash. Or a whole bunch of peoples’ leashes.

Where was everyone? I turned in place at the
window and realized I hadn’t seen any of the others. Oh, yeah, I thought, there’s
an easy way to find out. I kicked my CL back on, looked at the near-field
location map, and saw all three of them in what looked like a small vestibule
at the far end of the suite. No, not a vestibule, but a mock-balcony, with
“fresh air” that blew in through arrays of micro-perforations in the window
panel. At the far left side of the vestibule, Enid was opening and closing the “window”
nearest her, watching how the inrush of wind caused the drapery falling from
her arm to rise and billow out. Kallhander and Ioné were talking about
something—out loud, I assumed, either for the sake of allowing her (or maybe me
as well) to overhear, or as cover for something in CL. They stopped as soon as
I approached.

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” I said. I
extruded a sidebar from the wall and put the bottle there.

Kallhander shook his head. “Not at all. I thought
you would appreciate having some privacy. You sounded frustrated the last time
we spoke.”

“I
am
frustrated. All I managed to do was
trade one blind lead for three more. Are those
all
the samples you were
able to scrape up?”

“That was everything remotely intact. Everything
else was too damaged to be considered useful.”

“What you were provided with,” Ioné said, “was
derived from multiple composite samples. There was very little that was
actually intact.”

I shook my head. “Well, we’re not going to learn a
damn thing more about whatever this is until we can get some extra pieces. And
that’s my last report for the night, because I’m taking the night
off
and getting out of this rat trap. If you’ve got nothing else for me to work
with, I’ve got nothing else to give you.”

“Keep in mind,” Kallhander said, “the forensics
team
is
still at work. They promised more for us tomorrow or earlier.”

“Great, I love promises. I love them even more
when they’re fulfilled. Now—” I made a tip-of-the-hat gesture (my hat was
hanging off the back of my room’s door) and gave him a smile. “—I’m gonna go
have some fun for a change. Enid, how would you like to go have some fun?”

Enid blinked as if I’d offered her a pony. “Wh—
sure!
Where to?”

“The place downtown I was talking about. Old
friend of mine from before, someone I knew in my previous career, she runs a
place there. A triathlete, maybe you’ve heard of her. Nishinga Urara?”

Enid nearly stomped on my foot with enthusiasm. “You’re
kidding
!”

Kallhander decided to show off. “Six Stella
Olympia gold medals; one-time holder of the two-gee hundred-meter dash speed
record for her weight class—”

“All right, all right, stop cheating. I was asking
if you’d
heard
of her, not whether or not you could look her up. There
is still a difference.”

“Actually,” Kallhander said, “I
had
heard
of her. That was among what I knew casually.” He gave me half a smile. “I was
about to find more, but you stopped me. Perhaps for the best.”

Shaking my head, I started walking back towards
the bedroom to fetch my hat—only to have not only Enid but the other two follow
me like they were being dragged on strings. Good grief, I thought; I hope they
don’t think they’ve been invited along. “Wait, back up, Henré!” Enid scooted
around in front of me. “How’d you get to know Nishi?”

“I was one of her first sponsors.” I said it with
some pride. “Back when she was still gunning for the Stella tryouts, I saw her
in a timed match against some big crazy piece of steak from Hanarvo, and she
just yanked his ass down to the mat again and again.” I reached around behind
the bedroom door, pulled out my hat, and adjusted it in the nearest mirror. “A
week later I had a sponsorship set up for her, and a month after that we were
having a sea-bream bake on the beach together with my family. At one point, Nishi
is out there running through the surf just to see what kind of time she can
make to the cape and back, with the water as a handicap. My little girl’s
tottering along after her. And my wife sees how I’m staring, and she taps my
shoulder and steps in front of me and says, ‘Excuse me, do I have
competition
?’
And I said, ‘Darlin’, I already asked her. She’s more interested in
you
than me.’
 
”

I could have sworn Ioné also smiled at that—but
then again, what hadn’t she smiled at? Maybe she was the one Kallhander had taken
cues from to unlearn all his Stoicism 102 lessons.

Enid, more to form, cackled. “I’d heard stories.
Sounds like the truth leaves them
way
behind.”

I must be getting better, I thought. It didn’t
even hurt me to remember all that.

Kallhander stepped back from the suite’s front
door—thank cosm for that, I thought; it's not like I
want
a chaperone—but
couldn’t resist getting in one last request: “At least provide us with a geolocation?
Just in case something does happen—”

“Yes,
Dad,
” Enid groaned, beating me to it.

Every city of any venerability has a “downtown”.
It may not be south on the map, or “down” in any physical sense of the word,
but there’s always some part of the map where you can point to and say,
that’s
downtown.
Typically after you’ve been there and gotten some of its dirt on
you.

Nobody plans a downtown. It sprouts out of the need
for any human place to develop its own history. The architecture becomes that
much more jumbled, the shadows fall all the darker and fuller. Buildings evolve
different limbs and wings that force jagged contours onto the streets. Sure, after
sundown the lights come on from every surface programmed to emit them—the
signage, the doorways, the windows, the undersides of awnings—but there’s still
a nighttime overhead and there’s still darkness reminding people that much more
how they are tied to the earth and sun. Maybe not just any one earth or sun alone,
but some pair of the two, revolving. They haven’t done away with night
altogether, not like in some places. There’s still that much of the Old Way
left here.

Downtown is not about the buildings, but about the
street—as a place to picnic, to sleep wherever a head could be laid, to stake
out a square plot of protocrete for yourself and hawk something from your own
hands. A handmade mirror, scarves of manually-grown organic silk flicked about
by the adjoining alley’s breeze, a statuette of Kathayas present and past in
lacquered wood or bronze or steel. Or maybe a political tract, one you play
through your CL and which unspools for an hour or two in a corner of your
vision and just below the threshold of your hearing. A side street wall becomes
your canvas, both in the real world and in CL-space. People use the street and
it uses them right back: they become extensions of the street, its own new
sense organs, its new limbs and embodiments.

All the previous incarnations of Kathayagara City
were like this, too. They all grew a downtown when everyone’s backs were
turned. The tension between the understandings of the Old Way and the needs of those
who wanted more created stress, and it was downtown where that stress created
the deepest cracks. Extremes went downtown to clash, with neither extreme
coming out ahead. That was why every other block, every other building sported
the head-and-crossbar logo of NO CL ALLOWED (EXCEPT FOR LIFE-THREATENING
EMERGENCIES AS PER PC:122/92/1). The plug-clubs and brain-bars sat side-by-side
with the after-hours cage-fight studios, the private browsing libraries from
the days when one of their books took up the same space as a billion of ours,
but required far less equipment to use, the rooftop garden-stack restaurants
that grew and harvested their own fare for those who could afford it
. . . All you had to do was walk from one end of a block to another
and you felt yourself lashing back and forth through time, shuttlecocking
between body and mind, purity and dissolution, primal hungers and refined
passions with each step.

After I’d started drifting, I’d drifted to worlds
that had a downtown. I’d let myself get stained by its grit and humidity,
thinking some of it would soak into my marrow, make me long to call that place
home. But I’d always find myself moving on, washing off the dirt and finding
myself untouched underneath, and never understanding why. Never did it occur to
me that I just wasn’t someone who could let himself get too dirty. I always had
to put some part of me above it all, so I could look down and not feel like I
was missing anything.

I didn’t want to watch downtown slip itself around
me from behind the window of a cab. I wanted to watch it becoming that much
more real with the actual steps I took. Or I could have had a fresh instance of
Kanthaka manufaxtured (I suspected they wouldn’t let me dig the original out of
storage right now), and ridden that. But some part of me understood that I
couldn’t spare the time to walk or the hour and change for a manufaxture to do
its work, that things like responsibility and schedules had been kicked out of
stasis by all that had happened in the last couple of days, and so I sat in the
seat of the cab and let the streets flick by.

Enid was in the front left rear-facing seat,
ankles resting on a little ledge she’d extruded from the door handle. She
barely ever sat with her feet flat on the ground. Part of me wanted to chew her
out for doing it in public, but enough of me found it endearing to put that
impulse aside and just look out the window along with her. She always had a
dreamy, distant look when she wasn’t paying attention to me or someone else—the
part of her that was still the little girl looking down at her mother’s
funerary marker and wishing she was someone else, somewhere else. But I looked
a little closer as the acid lights of downtown slid across her eyes, and I saw
something else: it was dreaminess, but a different flavor. It was someone
plotting how they were going to throw themselves into that ocean just outside
and not only swim in it but drink it all for themselves. At first it had been
hard for me to believe someone her age could have ambition like that, and have
them in a way that was as real as any ambition of mine. But I was starting to
believe it now, and I was even starting to admire it too.

And the only reason you recognize that look in her
eyes, I thought, is because you feel like it’s something you’ve had in your own
any number of times before.

I had a whole buzzing horde of reasons in my head
for why I wanted to see Nishinga. I’d done a lousy job of making allies for
myself over the past several years, and it would be nice to see if there was
someone I could still count on who was not one of the friends I’d just made in
the past couple of days. I doubted it—the last time we’d said anything to each
other it had been accompanied by her whacking me a good one across the back of
the head—but there was no way to know without trying. The only way I could
convince her my act had been not just cleaned up but decked out in a fresh
jacket sporting a boutonnière was to do it in person.

Nishinga had retired from fighting about two years
after I’d retired from my own career. She had scraped together enough money to
launch her own training hall, and I’d been tempted before to drop in so one of
her cronies could bruise my ribs a bit for fun. Even an NKF boxing trainer program
only allowed me to put up so much of a defense against them; it would be an
actual
match.
But the one time I’d tried to drop in, post-
Kyritan
,
I found things had soured between us for keeps. That was my diplomatic way of
explaining it to other people; she used harsher language.

Since then I’d heard from others all the stories
about how the Urara Center had mutated. First came the little
klatsch
of
regulars who sat to one side, former pro fighters who now mostly drank and gave
off-color commentary but had wise enough eyes and words that no one, including
Nishinga herself, could work up the nerve to throw them out. Eventually an
actual bar was set up, complete with licensing, and the Center went from
training hall to a kind of eatery-drinkery-beater-uppery. You came, you got a
ringside seat—they were all ringside, really—you ordered something, and you
watched folks either spar as practice or duke it out for real. Then folks
drifted in who never once lifted their fists but had plenty of other things to
show off in front of a crowd: comedians, protomic action painters, sound-poetry
duelists, chess-dancers, anyone who could hold your attention for anywhere from
a few seconds to twenty minutes on end, and still use all your original bodily
senses to do it. Nishinga drifted further into the background, and soon set up
another
,
more formal, training club one flight up—but the original Urara Center still
retained the original ring and the seats all around it as its stage.

Urara Center had been originally on a different
world, but a few solar years back some enterprising developer offered Nishinga
piles of money and a major tax break if she agreed to move the Center (and its
newly-built gym) to downtown Kathayagara City, into a development stack named
Tunner Heights that had been designed specifically to house transplanted
constructions. It was ten city blocks worth of buildings four or five stories
high, all piled on top of each other in a framework that included sidewalks,
ambient daytime simulation lighting and an external elevator in case you weren’t
lucky enough to arrive by cab. The other residents were also imports.

We docked at the sixth level and leaned back
against the windshield that wrapped all the way around the superstructure. That
was the problem with these damned stacks, I mused: they combined the worst
aspects of both a closed building and an open city block. Without the
windshield, you got horrible gusts of wind even only a few levels up; with it, you
felt like the whole block was about to he packed up and shipped somewhere (which
wasn’t far from the truth of what
had
happened). But then again, that
was precisely the sort of prejudice that someone who’d been raised on a planet
sparse enough not to need such things—i.e., me and mine—would have. Enid loved
the view, from what I could tell: she put her forehead against the shield and
peered across and down.

“Door’s
that
way,” I said, pointing back.

“I just wanna look at this for a bit.” She didn’t
add
through my own eyes
, since she must have known she could have
plugged into any number of public view feeds to see roughly the same view, but
after seeing her mooning over the MemoCel while on the couch . . . yeah,
it
was
the same look in her eyes. And once I put aside all of my
urban-planning issues with the construction of what we were standing in, the
view was indeed a beauty. Light all the way down; lights all the way across;
lights to the horizon and the first few tiny stars finally winking into view
above. Mixed in below us, on multiple levels, were the swift blips of cars and
transports and the slow squirming of pedestrians. I understood now why people
had their buildings transplanted into piles like this: it gave them a context
you couldn’t get any other way.

Directly across from us was a dance studio, where
couples in diaphanous white and slender black (or sometimes the reverse)
swirled around each other, lifting each other up and setting each other down.
Sometimes they floated to the ceiling and stayed there. Enid’s arms bent in the
space next to her as if to embrace an unseen partner and let them raise her
aloft.

She turned and looked at me with an energy I hadn’t
been expecting. “You wanna run over there after this? I’d bet they wouldn’t
mind us dropping in.”

“
 
‘Us’
meaning ‘you’, specifically. My two left feet would be about as welcome in
there as a genetic forecasting engineer at an Old Way birthing.”

“Come on, you’re not
that
uncoordinated.
You did a pretty good job running like mad before, remember?”

“Actually, it’s not the feet but the head. And not
coordination, but motivation. Last time I went dancing was with the old lady
and the little girl.” I looked at her, expecting to see her shrinking back from
me having said that, but she wasn’t. Curious, more like.

“That said,” I went on, “there’s nothing that says
we can’t poke our heads in there after we’re done here. It’s just been a while
since I cut any rugs.”

“And I know I’ve never cut one with you, so it’ll
be a learning experience for both of us.” She looked pleased as she pushed away
from the windshield.

What she might mean by
learning experience
bothered me as I turned and led her to the front door of the Urara Center. I’d
never been easy with the idea that she had latched onto me out of the kind of
emotional attachment I wasn’t about to reciprocate.

I liked her; I couldn’t ignore that anymore. I
liked her more than enough not to get in the way of someone else who was far
more appropriate for her. That and she had a lot more in front of her than I
did, a totally different kind of future. She didn’t deserve to be distracted by
the likes of me.

Especially since she already has a father, I
thought. And he can keep her.

Next to the front door was the “barred head” logo—no
CL activity inside, please, we’re Old Way. There was, however, no warning that
a jamming mechanism might be in effect. Evidently a lot of the places that had
instigated such a thing had experienced ghastly backlashes from even non-CL
users, so I suspected what they really meant was no CL activity as a substitute
for perfectly good mouths and tongues. The enforced rule had now become a
polite suggestion, with CL control of protomics now allowed as a sop. The Old
Way was becoming that much less of a
way
, and that much more of a mere
menu choice.

I walked through the front door of the club and
almost stepped into a hole in the floor.

No modern protomic construction ever looks more
than a little seedy. Dated in its style, maybe, and even that can be fixed, but
never flat-out ratty. The trim on the tables never curls off, the rugs never
have ruts worn in them, and if someone puts a hole in the ceiling by raising a
chair too high it takes no more effort to fix that than it does to close a door
left open by mistake. The Urara Center was originally built like that, but
Nishinga had added an extension to the protomic self-repair routines that one
of her barkeep buddies had dreamed up: the later it got and the rowdier the
crowd became, the grittier the environment in the place. The floorboards would
spontaneously creak that much more, the water stains and dents in the ceiling
would come back, and the canvas in the ring would become that much more
tattered. “An experiment in sympathetic atmosphere” was the way she’d put it,
although she docked people points and favors for trying to
deliberately
trash the place by throwing things. You had to make it happen on its own.