Flight of the Vajra (42 page)

“R3DI? Even
I
remember
that
.” Enid
looked and sounded like she’d just tasted bile.

“Yeah, but you seem to be taking this a little
personally,” I said to Kallhander. “A lot more personally than I thought you
would have—heck, a lot more personally than
I’m
taking it. If anyone,
I
should be wincing. It’s never nice when someone weaponizes the technology
that’s the cornerstone of your life’s work. But let’s face it—how many times,
how many ways have technologies been turned into something the manufacturer
never intended? Life goes on anyway.” I looked at him a little more closely;
he’d only deigned to glance once, briefly, in either of our directions while
talking.
Shame,
I thought, that’s what this is. That’s the look of a man
with shame oozing up from under him. No prizes for guessing how I know what
that’s like.

“Are you worried,” I went on, “that you’re going
to be
blamed
for this? Is that it? That people are going to think you’re
somehow responsible for letting this cat out of its bag? Or for not coming up
with a way to do something about it?”

His words, all three of them, spoken with the
authority of a summary judgment, were long seconds in coming: “Ka-shen Jiang.”

I shook my head. Enid was most likely looking up
that name through her CL even as Kallhander went on speaking. I could have
found the answers myself too, but how Kallhander talked about it was going to
make all the difference.

“What about him?” I said.

“He was my professor.”

That kept us quiet long enough for him to keep
talking.

“The conventional wisdom is that Ka-shen Jiang was
the first protomic scientist to demonstrate how a conventional protomic
machine’s functionality could be coerced into revealing inconsistencies in its
internal state that could be used as a vector of attack. He was far from the
first. This is something that has been with us since information technology
first appeared. Versions of this attack have appeared and been patched ever
since protomics were invented. His research was merely the latest in a long
line of such attacks. That said, he was a professional, and so he did the right
thing—he disclosed it behind closed doors to Protomica Ltd. and all the other
major manufacturers. They set to work adding his suggested corrections into the
next iteration of protomic programming, and he went home satisfied, according
to everyone who knew him.

“A week and a half later Jiang killed himself.”

“And he left behind a note,” Enid picked up,
evidently having finished her research in our local cache of whatever reference
works his name had been in, “saying something like, ‘If you keep going in the
direction I’m going, you’ll never be able to forgive yourselves either.’ And
people thought he’d discovered some kind of super-weakness in protomics, but
they were never able to make much of the notes he’d left behind. That and he
was apparently pretty, you know . . . ” She made an up-and-down
motion in the air with one finger.

How about that, I thought. Looks like she’s
getting re-accustomed to having a CL. Even if it’s just for the sake of not
wanting to look like the odd wheel out in the conversation.

Kallhander nodded, finally looking at her. “He did
have psychological issues; no one denies that. All the same, his family fought
hard to separate Jiang the man from Jiang the researcher. They were not,
however, able to uproot the idea that Jiang was on the verge of repudiating his
life’s work, or something to that effect. No one close to him, not even his
husband, believed that. But the rumors spread all the same: Ka-shen Jiang died
because he didn’t want to let the world know he had discovered a way to destroy
their way of life.”

I gave Kallhander another shake of the head. “You
don’t strike me for one solar second as being someone with that kind of doubt.
You’re not worried about
your
name being dragged through the mud. Get
real.”

“No, you’re correct. It’s not that, precisely.
It’s something else.”

“Such as what?” Enid’s voice was skeptical, but
still hushed.

“I worry that the decision to weaponize these
things has passed into someone else’s hands,” Kallhander said. “I worry that he
not only discovered this before I did, but followed the road it provided for
him—followed it all the way to the end, and never looked back once. I worry he
did all this long before I ever started my work, or before you and I ever began
looking at the evidence we collected. Because I can see—very distantly, very
hazy, but I
can
see—where this could all lead. And it could lead, if
followed far enough and ruthlessly enough, to the very place that Ka-shen Jiang
saw.
That
is what I worry: that there is a place at the end of that
road, a devastated place, which he saw but could not talk about, and in the end
he closed his eyes to it. And that this might be the beginning of our journey
down that road.”

If he’s going to tell me these things, I thought,
it’s only because he trusts me just enough to act on them in the right way.
Even if that means rubbing his face in it.

“You ever hear of ‘horizon fever’?” I said. I
didn’t care if he chose to look it up just then; I went on anyway. “That’s what
that sounds like to me. Staring at where the sky and the ground meet, on and
on, until your eyes just about burn out of your head. That’s what this amounts
to, you know.”

Kallhander didn’t look like a man obsessing about
one possible future, though. He looked more like someone who was having trouble
making up his mind what to have for dinner. But I was learning not to trust
what he looked like on the outside.

“What does your partner think?” Enid said.

Kallhander shook his head. “She doesn’t share my
concerns. Like you, she finds them rather overblown. Even I find them overblown,
given some thought. But that hasn’t stopped me from bearing them in mind.”

“No one’s saying you shouldn’t bear them in mind.”
I almost thumped his shoulder, but thought better of it. “Just don’t get eaten
up by it. —Says the man who is the expert in being eaten up by things, okay?
All I got from it was tail-chasing and self-imposed exile. Don’t go there.”

“I haven’t. In fact, I’m grateful that you heard
this out as thoroughly as you did.”

“Because if you
do
go there, I will hunt
you down, spank you, and put you to bed with no dinner.”

Enid giggled into her fist. Even Kallhander had to
smile, albeit only in his pinched and limited way.

“Hey, you wanted my help; I’m giving it.” I said,
taking my turn to smile as well. “You know your stuff better than most anyone
else I’ve dealt with in the past half-decade. I can’t just turn my nose up at
someone who actually had a
challenge
to offer me.”

“Well, that was why I chose you.”

I hadn’t doubted it. I was pleased I’d gotten him
to admit it, though. Especially, as Enid had said before, in front of a
witness.

“The Ertylian archive, by the way,” Kallhander
said, settling back in his seat, “has a Ka-shen Jiang Memorial Hall. He used to
teach there.”

“In person?” Enid sounded halfway between
skeptical and laudatory. “That must have been an experience.”

“He was a large man, Professor Jiang.” Kallhander
gestured at me. “At least as tall as you. Very big hands; sometimes when he was
talking he’d hold them up like this—’’ He framed his face with both hands.
“—and I always thought he was going to bring them around his mouth and start
shouting
at us.”

It took so little work on his part for him to come
alive like that, I thought, or to batten right back down. It wasn’t until much
later, after we’d had our third meal and I was preparing to sleep through the
next few jumps, that I realized how the whole conversation might well have been
yet another of his setups. What better way for us to feel like he was that much
more trustable, that much more one of “ours”, than to admit some fear or
vulnerability that might never have existed in the first place except as an
abstraction of an abstraction?

I’ll know it’s real, I told myself, when it does
happen. I’ll know it when I see it. Just no bets on that happening.

On the end of the first full solar day of transit,
Angharad unpacked her travel bag and—as promised, she declared—loaned Enid her
comb.

“This is Merridonian boxwood,” Enid said. Her voice
dropped with awe over the last two words as she turned the delicate-fanged
little thing around and around in her fingers. She looked faintly afraid to run
it through her hair.

“It was a gift from the Merridonian prime
minister,” Angharad said. “After the business of the immigration issue with Omn
Leva was concluded, he came to the cottage where I had been bunking during my
time there. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘is very shy. But also very grateful.’ She had
apparently made the comb by hand and been saving it for some occasion that
demanded its use as a gift, but could not muster the nerve to present it to me.
I saw her once, during a reception dinner. All I saw of that poor woman was the
top of her head and the bridge of her nose, since she spent most of the time
looking into her lap.”

Enid gave the comb one more turn in her fingers,
then placed it back in Angharad’s upturned hand.

“See what happens when you ask someone like her
for a comb?” I said. “You get an heirloom. Better yet: you get a planetary
treasure.”

“I have no objections to her using it,” Angharad
said. “I would rather it be honestly used by her than simply sit in the bottom
of my valise. Time and again I remember it, but time and again I find myself
using nothing more than an ordinary fabbed brush. I am always afraid of
breaking it.” She once again held out the hand with the comb on it; Enid once
again took it, and gingerly raked it through her red-fringed hair.

“But it’s for decorating,” Enid said, “and not
really for anything else, isn’t it?”

“Everything we call ‘decorative’ now was once
nothing more than a simple tool,” Angharad said. “Those ancient vases you see
in museums, with all of their glazing and color—they were in their time just as
quotidian as today’s protomically-cast glassware. The value of something is all
in what we demand of it.”

Enid stopped tugging at her hair, reached up, and
installed the comb into her hairline just above her forehead. It didn’t really
fit anything else she was wearing, and it stood out against her white hair like
a pattern-projection glitch on protomic fabric. But she seemed pleased with it
when she faced the mirrored bathroom door. “Right now,” she said, “I just want
this to stay put when I do a handstand.”

“That might be asking a bit much,” I said. “But
try it.”

She hand-stood. The comb stayed put.

“So, you’re going to wear that on stage?” I
suggested.

She righted herself and tossed hair out of her
face. “I was thinking about . . . a kind of a performance that I’d
do, something that I got an idea for back during Cioran’s show. You remember
how he’d do that thing where everyone in the audience felt like they were
getting a one-on-one serenade through the CL? I was thinking of something like
that—with or without the CL—where I’d do something very . . . stripped-down
and small-scale, like a one-on-one performance involving just a few little
props and things. If there was a crowd, then they’d get it through CL and it
would feel like the same kind of thing, like I was telling them something for
their ears only.”

I let the image of that wash around in my head for
a few seconds. “That’s a
great
idea.”

Enid plucked the comb back out. “You think? —I
mean, I had this idea kicking around in one form or another for a while, but
. . . ” She faced Angharad. “ . . . I’d had something else
in mind to use as a prop, but it didn’t feel right. Or maybe it was just that
it wasn’t something that had all of the things behind it that this one does.”

“I want very much to see what you do with it,”
Angharad said.

“Well, so do I! It’s about time I got back into
the habit of surprising myself.”

If Enid grins any wider, I thought, she’s going to
sprain her buccinators.

That
something else
, I then thought: maybe
that was in the moment when I’d come across her toying with her sleeves as
props. Was that because the comb was unique and those sleeves (or even her
MemoCel with its goodbye wishes recorded on it) weren’t? Then again, it wasn’t
the fact that the comb had been hand-made that made it unique; it was the story
Angharad had spun around it. And you could spin a story around anything. The
most anodyne, disposable,
protomic
piece of your life could be made into
legend if there was nothing to stop you.

Note to self: take said lesson to heart sooner
rather than later.

Cioran bounded up the little spiral gangway at the
aft of the cabin. “Ma’am Your Grace?” he said. “The first installment of my
report’s available for your consumption. Part one of . . . I’d say
three. Possibly four. Maybe five if I find that digging for the juiciest, most
outré bits of gossip proves fruitful.”

“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “She said
research
.
Not
tabloid scandal.
”

Cioran squinted in cheery embarrassment. “We-ell
. . . I wouldn’t say there’s
overlap
between the two, exactly,
but there’s a good deal of—”

“Own up, you. What kind of report is this turning
into?”

Cioran’s deep breath sounded a little too ragged
to be authoritative, but he took it anyway. “Five of the key diplomats
attending Bridgehead are people with whom I have had more than passing acquaintances.
This much you probably know. Of those five, three of them could be considered
friends. Patrons, at one point or another. Two of them were a good deal more
than friends. And one of those two—”