Flight of the Vajra (29 page)

It had been a long time since I’d done the CL
Idiot Stare. You know the look: where someone’s CLing furiously, and while they
haven’t disengaged their local senses they might as well have, because all
they’re doing is standing there boggling at something about six thousand klicks
in the distance. (Having their nose running is optional, but adds to the whole
effect.) I just about dropped the bottle of Benimaru and the shotglass when
Enid gave me a gentle prod and did the flash-the-hands-at-the-eyes test to make
sure I wasn’t completely corked up.

“Henré?” she said. “You have a few too many there?”

I looked over at Kallhander and Ioné, who were
doing their damndest not to seem too smug for their own good.

“Is there more?” I asked them, my voice hollowed
and humbled.

“There’s more, yes.” Kallhander nodded. “But I
haven’t been authorized to release any of it, I’m afraid. Not until we have
some idea of what Angharad would think of this offer.”

I put the cap back on the bottle and held it by
the neck. No, smashing him over the head with it wouldn’t improve my lot, but
it might have made me feel real good for about two seconds.

“I don’t know,” I said, “and I don’t particularly
care, either, if this was your idea or theirs.” All the earlier icy anger had
drained out of me, leaving me wrung out and numb. “But I’ll pass the word
along. The worst she can say is no, right?”

I gave Kallhander a smile that was as fake and
carved-out as anything he’d shown me, backed into my room, and kicked the door
closed. It was only after I’d sagged onto the bed did I realize I still had the
bottle in my hand. It was protocrystal, like the shot glasses themselves, so I
could have swung it by the neck and flung it into the opposite wall, and all it
would do was leave a dent. Tomorrow, I told myself, one way or another I’m
checking out of this cushy jail . . .

But I’d said the same thing yesterday, hadn’t I?

It might have been an hour later
—I
wasn’t bothering to check—when Enid entered, using her room key. I was propped
up on the bed, one leg out on the chair next to me, still mulling over the
half-pieces and missing pieces I’d been turning around and around since
Kallhander had given me the third file. I’d also drained the Benimaru, and was
in that twilight state between drunken awareness and actual sleep. Drunk or
not, I could tell I needed just a few more pieces for this puzzle. I had a bit
of ancient statuary, still missing its arms and nose.

“You should sleep,” Enid said. “I’m gonna do that
now myself.”

I didn’t say anything, just killed the simulation
and reached out to remove my shoes.

“What do you want to do?” she said.

I faced her for the first time since she came in
and pushed myself to me feet. Not the best plan: with my shoes off, my feet
felt weirdly vulnerable and soft against the floor, like at any moment they’d
melt off and leave me stumbling around on stumps.

“I’m going to get whatever else they have that has
my family’s name on it,” I said. “Because I know what’ll happen to me if I
don’t. I’ll just lie there and wonder.” I took a couple of steps and realized
it was going to be a bit of an adventure just to get to the other side of the
room. That Benimaru, it melts you out when you’re not looking.

Didn’t help that you had all those other drinks in
you as well, too, I thought.

“But at the same time,” I went on, “let’s not
forget we have options open. Maybe Cioran can help out, too. Said he liked us,
anyway.” I laughed at my own words, took another step, and then felt Enid’s
arms wrap around my torso and guide me back down to the edge of the bed.
“Yeah—that’s vintage Henré Sim for you. Hasn’t even had more than one complete
conversation with that Cioran and he’s already thinking about rolling him for
favors . . . That’s the life I’ve been leading for years, so why
not?”

Enid started helping me tug my clothes off from
the top down; I cleared my head enough to reach over, remove her hands, and
continue where she left off. She hadn’t gotten far.

“I hate relying on those people,” I said. “No,
it’s deeper. I hate relying on people. Period.”

“Why?”

“You ought to know this one yourself. You left the
circus because you didn’t want to go their way anymore, but you still depended
on them for so many things. But those were all things you could get other ways
if you just tried. With this . . . ” I gestured at the door, and by
proxy the other two people just beyond it. “With this, all the things I depend
on them for I can’t get anywhere else.”

“Are you sure of that?”

I paused, thought about it, shook my head,
instantly regretted doing so. Felt like the whole inner ear had come loose. “They’re
the ones who have it now. Those cards, I’m not going to find them in another
deck. At least not unless . . . ”

“Unless what?”

“Unless we’re talking about connections even I
don’t have anymore. Nishi poisoned a lot of wells for me when she slammed the
door in my face back when. Maybe, like I said, if we hit it off with Cioran we
can bring some of them back around to our way of thinking.” I wasn’t even
planning how all of this could be executed; all I could see with my eyes shut
was that wall of cells from the simulation, curving about and bounding back
against itself, enclosing something else that would only emerge if I added back
in more missing code. My mouth was talking all by itself. “Trouble with IPS is
they really do have the best of a lot of things. They just offer it to you on
the worst of terms.”

The lights went out. I took my hand away from my
face and set the alarm.

“Henré?” Enid murmured from her bed. I’d also
started to re-instantiate the privacy barrier with silent mode on, but she had stopped
me.

“Hm?” I said.

“You liked the performance I did in the club?”

“I was jealous.” I was drunk enough to say it and
not care that I did.

“Jealous of me? Or
him
?”

You’ve got jealousy welling up in you? I said to
myself. Go on, let it well up. Let it overflow. Then point at it and laugh.
That’ll set you free.

“Cioran, you mean?” I said. “It’s hard not to be
jealous of someone like that no matter who you are.”

“Why? He likes you too, doesn’t he? You told me as
much.”

“He just met me. And with someone like that
. . . it’s hard to say what they really mean when they ‘like’
someone. When you ‘like’ everyone in general, then you’re not really liking
anyone in particular, are you?”

“So what’s your response to that—don’t like anyone
at all?”

“No. Just . . . save it for the people
that really matter. Besides, it’s not his talent I’m jealous of, if you’re
wondering. It’s his freedom.”

“You have the same freedom he does. You can go
anywhere—”

“If I was that free, would I be jumping whenever
Kallhander cracks his whip? I’m not free. I have this leash I’ve been trying to
take off my neck for years now, and I can never bring myself to do it. For
years I was teetering on the edge of taking it off, playacting at having taken
it off when inside I was telling myself ‘I’m just looking for the right
moment.’ And every time I got within reach of taking it off for real, every
time I got ready to shuck off the past for real, I always felt the same thing.”

“Which was?”

“
 
‘What
will they think of me?’
 
”

Her laugh was a short, loud bark. “What do
you
,
of all people, care what other people think?”

“Well, there it is,” I said. “I shouldn’t, right?
But there it is. I try not to care, but then some part of me says otherwise.”
My words came out feeling as heavy as the rest of me. “Some part of me that
does wonder what police, and fifteen-year-old girls, and everyone I haven’t met
yet will think. Believe me. I’ve tried to shut that part up, tried to go into
my room and shut the door to it. But it has a way of . . . of mailing
itself back into the room under the door.”

My eyes had closed of their own accord, but I
heard the rustle of the bedclothes as she climbed out and the faint pad of her
feet next to my bed. I opened my eyes and saw her looking down at me—not with
spite or disdain or a juvenile sneer, not with any of the things I was bracing
for, but with something very sad that if I didn’t know better seemed akin to
love.

“If you put all that down tomorrow,” she said,
“all that worry about your family, all that worry about other people
. . . ” She let out a little laugh that was halfway to being a sob.
“If you dropped it all right now, I wouldn’t think you were a
beast
.
You’ve always just been the man I met while I was bumming around on Cytheria,
the guy who got me places I didn’t think I would ever get to and saved my ass
when everyone else was covering theirs. And really liked my stage show. And
gave me some nice pointers on my outfit. Okay? Everything you were before all
of that doesn’t count. For me, anyway. And if anyone gets snippy with me about why
I’m like that with you, I’ll just tell them what you told me.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m saving it for the people that really
matter.”

I smiled up at her. “I’m gonna see how much more I
can get out of those two out there, but from now on it’s on our terms, not
theirs. We’ve got other places to go and other people to confound.” She giggled
at that, just as she was supposed to. “You still in for taking this ride with
me?”

“All the way to the last stop.”

That was all I remembered saying to her before I
realized I’d started toying with the data I’d been given—a dangerous thing to
do when you’re on the verge of sleep, because you can end up in a space that
amounts to a programmed nightmare. I recognized immediately what all the things
growing there had been harvested from: it was a redux of my earlier, futile
efforts to make full sense of the evidence I’d been given. I was once again
staring at that sheet of cells, folding back over itself and creating a
surface—but I wasn’t staring at some single sector of it, watching the
(simulated) data and the (emulated) electrical impulses flowing in and out. It
was a sheet of material, macroscopic, 1:1 in scale, pressing down over the
front and back of my body like a shroud. It tightened between my fingers, inserted
itself into my nostrils, plugged my ears, then subdivided even further and
inserted fibers finer than any hair into every pore. My panic and thrashing
melted away, along with the cells of my body. I was being absorbed by this
uterine-like lining, not to become a single cell as in a conventional gestation
but to simply evaporate back into this material’s existing instruction set.
This womb had been designed to build me, and I knew this now upon realizing
that the emulation clock had been set to tick at -1. I had experienced its
activity cycle play out in reverse.

It’s a womb, I thought.

Somehow, I had eyes to see again. I opened them
and saw a membrane being lifted away above me, its microscopic cell pattern
somehow visible to me normally, as if several orders of magnitude had been
added to the resolution of my eyesight. Embedded in that membrane was all the
contours and creases of my own body. But in the first moments when it was
lifting away, all I saw was the backside of a mask. The eyes were shut tight;
the mouth set in a mournful line, the lips very slightly parted in the center.
I had seen such a face before, on a man I’d visited on the first leg of my
apology tour. It was the face of a man for whom grief and longing have become
forever married, for whom all hope has become the same as all despair. He was
not weeping only because there were no tears left.

I know what that is like, I thought. All too well.
I know it well enough now to also know that I can’t let that be all I am. I am
just enough like you, whoever you are, to know now I must be like you no
longer.

The womb was gone and I was once again in the warmth
of my own bed.

I was up, showered, shaved, changed
and
had breakfast for two popped out of the niche before Enid had even rolled over.
The suite’s complementary dispensary squeezed me out a rehydration gel in its
own single-use shotglass; I tossed that back and let it do its magic during my
time in the bath. Maybe I was just playacting at being motivated, but I had a
receptive audience for such a performance, consisting of one immediate
member—Enid—and possibly several others as circumstances permitted.

Nothing from Cioran in my CL; for all I knew he was
still partying with Nishi and the rest of them. I sent a note to Angharad—brief
and pointed:
Thought over your proposition. We should talk details today.
Lunch?
Let her decide where, I thought; if she needed to get out of her
house for a bit, so did we.

Enid ate before bathing, face still swollen and
hair still flattened and lank from sleep. She needed extra moments with each
bite to make sure her fingers made it to her mouth and not merely to someplace
adjacent. “I need a swab or something,” she mumbled, “to get all the damn
cotton candy out of my head.”

“Definition of irony,” I said. “I’m the one that
drank and
you’re
the one with the hangover. Or is that something else?”

“I kept waking up.”

“They have CL programs for that, you know.”

“I hate them. I never feel like I’ve actually
slept
when I use them. Some part of me just knows the difference, you know?”

I did in fact know. I was about to mention there
were drugs that worked very well, too, but this wasn’t a fight worth having—not
when I agreed with her in principle, anyway.

Angharad’s office replied right as I was refilling
our coffee:
Lunchtime perfect. R’vous at the Gamma Anteria. Rsv under
“Yjahli.”

Not Achitraka House? I thought. It wasn’t like I
didn’t trust her to do the right thing by herself, but some part of
Kallhander’s speeches about Angharad maybe not always knowing what was best for
her came back to mind.

Enid looked that much more lively after knocking
back her tumbler of macetera juice, but she perked up even further when I told
her the day’s plans. “The Gamma Anteria? That’s right near the Taurodrome—it’s
practically a ringside seat for it, come to think of it.”

“Something special about the Taurodrome?”

“
Cioran
.” She winked. “He leaked word to me
right before we got dragged out of there—that’s where he’s doing tonight’s ambush
concert. Hey, maybe Angharad booked booths there so she wouldn’t have to fight
the crowds for a good view!”

“Somehow I don’t see her being a Cioran fan,” I
said, pushing my knife too hard and tearing through part of my challah toast.
“Not with the two of them more or less standing on opposite sides of the Old
Way divide. Can you imagine her walking up to him after a show, honor guard on
either side of her, ‘Excuse me . . . might I have your autograph?’
And then she stoops down so he can sign her forehead.”

“I took her for the kind that offered a piece of
clothing, personally.”

“The headpiece or the dress?”

“Well, probably not the loin wrap.”

We were both laughing by then, but she surprised
me by sobering up first.

“You think she’d take it personally if we knew we
were talking about her like that?” I said.

“I won’t say anything if you won’t say anything.”

“Fair enough.”

Amazing how much furtive guilt can be crammed into
two words, I thought. She looked away and started changing the pattern on her
outfit to something darker and more sedate.

I gave myself some credit.
After
breakfast, I’d been able to sit within a few feet of Kallhander and not become
tempted to aim anything at his forehead. I’d run back through the insights I’d
generated from my pre-sleep reverie and confirmed them, then turned the whole
package over to him and watched his face smooth out as if he were about to say
Yes
. . . very good . . . that’s quite something after all.

“So what do you think it is?” I asked Kallhander
after he sent the report off.

“Based on where we’ve found it,” he said, “and the
general gist of its behavior as you’ve described it, my prevailing theory is
that it’s some kind of custom field-trauma unit. An enclosure of that size
seems to be large enough to accept an adult human by default, for one, and the
lining itself seems to serve that function. But without more working pieces,
that’s all just conjecture.”

“Right, but why whomp something like that together
custom? There’s a whole mess of off-the-shelf portable trauma pods out there.
Why go through the trouble of hacking together something like that on your own?
Which is why I’m thinking that’s not what it is.”

“You have an alternate theory?”

“Nothing more than ‘it’s not that’. Well—a little
more than that, but it’s a wild guess right now.”

“A wild guess may not be as wild as it sounds.”

“I think it’s some kind of manufaxture. I could
see something like this being useful in an uprising, for instance: a weapons
forge. But the pieces of the program that actually perform the assembly aren’t in
any of the bits that have been scraped together so far. Plus, there’s one other
thing that kind of bugged me.” I shouldn’t have been saying any of this, but
the part of me that loved talking shop was taking over. “The clock cycle on the
unit. It’s . . . long. Really, really long.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Most of the time with a device like this you only
have one clock. This one has
two
clocks—an ‘inner’ clock and an ‘outer’
clock. The inner clock is the conventional one, but the outer clock is geared
with the smallest tick being about one solar week. The inner clock is for all
the standard housekeeping and behavioral functions, but the outer one—I have no
idea what it’s hooked to or what it’s meant to govern. The only time I’ve seen
anything like that is in some architectural applications, things where you’re
tracking movements or behavior over a long period of time in a large area.”

I interrupted the silence that followed: “We need
more code.”

“You will get it.” He sounded like a destitute
father promising his son a pedal-powered two-wheeler. I knew I couldn’t afford
to ascribe real sincerity to him or anything he did, but he was damn good at
making me believe he had it.

“Enid and I are going to meet Angharad for lunch
and talk about everything,” I went on. “I’ll be passing along your request as
well, for what it’s worth. If nothing else, just to see the look on her face.”

“I still maintain that our presence will be more
of a boon than you believe it will.”

I tried another tack. “If she says no, what then?”

“If she says no to us, and you stay with her, then
unless I’m told otherwise we won’t be permitted to continue collaborating. I’m
hoping the amount of help you’ve provided so far, especially with this last set
of conjectures, will allow us to suspend that rule.”

“You ever thought about going freelance?” I said.
I didn’t know where that came from. No, now that I thought about it, I could
tell: it came from, or was in response to, the slightly sad way certain words came
out of him. Like those last few had. “I know there’s lot of ex-IPS folks—they
resign their commission, sell their expertise in all kinds of different arenas.
They don’t get the support of the IPS, of course, but they get a lot of
latitude of movement, all this freedom they never had before. Pay’s not as
regular, but hey, that’s what savings accounts are for. —It’s just one of those
things where I look at you and I think, you’d do just as well on your own
without all these stupid rules hemming you in.”

“The rules are also what provide structure and
definition to the work,” he said. “I have thought about going on my own; I’ve
never entirely dismissed it. But I thought about it thoroughly enough to
realize something else: so much of the meaning of what I do is bound up with
being part of that corps. Outside of it I think I would be a great deal less
. . . ”

“ . . . effective,” I said for him.

“Effective, yes. The results are crucial.”

“Then again, look at me,” I said, pushing myself
to my feet. “Look at where I’m going. You think I don’t feel like I’m about to
put all my eggs in a basket that might not have a bottom? But I know if I don’t
do that, all I’m doing is throwing away something I’ll never see again. If I
stay where I am, I’m gonna rot. I know this.”

“Maybe not
rot
,” Enid said from the doorway
behind me, “but you sure won’t have as much fun.”

I turned back from her to see Kallhander offering
me a hand. I shook it. Ioné offered hers as well, and said, “We look forward to
whatever this liaison affords you.”

“It might afford something for both of us, you
know.”

“That goes without saying, yes,” Kallhander smiled.
“But good luck to you first.”

For the first time since I’d met him, I had no
trouble convincing myself he meant it. I was getting better at believing in
little things. Maybe from there the big things that most needed believing would
follow suit. It was nice to think so, anyway.

The Gamma Anteria
consisted of the top
six floors of a forty-five story building—tall enough to overlook the Taurodrome,
transparent roof and all. Actually, sometimes it was the top six floors;
sometimes it was the top ten; and sometimes it was the top fifteen. The brisker
the business they were doing in any given season, the more floors they’d extrude
upwards—with each floor containing four ballrooms each with its own adjoining
dining room, one for each party. Conspicuous consumption at its most pointless
and pretentious, and their claims of how reclaiming and re-instantiating those
floors added the sort of extra security demanded by their clientele were
questionable at best. The
chef de cuisine
, a Highend from Aogora, had
been running the place for one hundred sixty-five solar years with the exact
same menu. The only thing he’d changed was the prices, which had started off exospheric
and only gone up.

The décor was the sort of tasteless protomic chintz
that passed for classy these days—rococo extrusions and diffraction-pattern
rainbow films on everything—and so Enid and I, in our dark formalwear, actually
looked less gaudy than the restaurant itself. In my suit and black tie, I
looked like an estranged member of some royal family; Enid’s dress, tights and
heels made her look like a private-school student on a day trip.

The maître d’ was probably also from Agora; she
had the lean, spindly look they cultivated there, and close-cropped red hair
and generous freckles. She nodded when I told her “Yjahli, party of
. . . uh, at least three,” and led us into a cylindrical elevator
large enough for any twenty of us. The elevator traversed the center of the
building, rotating into position to face one of the four quadrants of the floor
we were to disembark on.

The elevator had been big, but the ballroom /
dining room we stepped out into was big enough to serve as a hangar for the
Vajra
with room to spare. Furnishings and tables could be extruded as needed; for us
they’d provided a table that hugged the floor, ringed with cushions and with
space beneath to place one’s legs. At one end of that table sat none other than
the Kathaya herself, who bowed low over it. So much for the view, I thought:
the window at the far end of the room had been opacified and covered with what
looked like a curtain but was really the same type of extrusion as the
surrounding walls. Enid looked disappointed that she wasn’t going to get so
much as a peek at the stadium below, but by the time we seated ourselves she
looked as bouncy as when she’d first stepped into the elevator. The maître d’
took our drink orders and promptly made herself scarce through a doorway that
appeared (and disappeared) next to the main elevator.

“You needn’t worry about privacy,” Angharad said.
“This place caters routinely to high-level functionaries of all stripes. They
pay their staff well enough to guarantee anything said here between us is in
confidence.” At her words, the overhead lights dimmed slightly and the in-table
lighting came on—probably her very cue that all present could now speak freely.
“They also have their own security staff.”

“Is that why we’re here instead of Achitraka
House?” Enid said.

Beat me to it, I thought. “We had an
. . .
interesting
conversation with Officers Kallhander and
Ioné about the level of compartmentalization in your staff,” I said. “Or maybe
better to say, the lack thereof. From what they told me, the Third Prelate was
pretty talkative when they got some time alone with him before we landed.”

“What was it they claim he said to them?” She
didn’t sound ruffled, but then again, when did she?

“He told them about the schism-to-be. Well, the
mere fact that one was being planned, but not much more than that.”

“I imagine you didn’t tell him much more than that
anyway,” Enid said.

“That is correct.” Angharad nodded. “I told him as
much as I felt he needed to know . . . and as much as I felt it would
be safe for others to know from him. He has always been remarkably deferential
to anyone he recognizes as an authority in a given situation.”

I was too busy staring at the number of zeroes on
some of the menu prices to fully appreciate what she said at first. When I
finally looked up, I saw Enid was still engrossed in the dessert selection;
evidently it hadn’t sunk in for her yet either.

“You
let
him leak it out,” I said.
That
made Enid look up, pop-eyed. “You told him so someone could find out, if they
put pressure on him; is that it?”

And damn the cosmos if Angharad didn’t have a
little smile on her face when she nodded slowly before speaking. “Since there
is no higher authority in the Achitraka than myself, the only other authority
of note that could pressure him directly would be some agent of IPS. There was
always the possibility that the mayor of Kathayagara City or one of his
associates would do that, but they have always been gracious enough to
communicate with me directly without any underhanded maneuvering.”