Flight of the Vajra (48 page)

I raced her back up the stairs as the first of the
three moons bled into full view. I thought about her saying
He can’t talk
about it because he doesn’t want me to cry
, and then something else came to
mind on top of that: Even in a universe this large, unbounded, and wholly
indifferent, anything that makes a girl break into tears can’t be any damn
good.

When CL was first devised,
people
talked about all the things it would now make possible. What I saw was how it
simply gave people new ways to be cliquish and insular at parties.

Ulli had left us all a standing invitation to
dinner, held on the villa rooftop. Some chilly air was coming in off the ocean
now that the sun was down, so they’d covered the roof and set a table
buffet-style for the seven of us. Lots of fish: glowrey salad (for the few real
meat-eaters in the batch); a local breed of freshwater shad (“Old Way OK”)
baked over rice; skewers of vegetables either grilled or battered and
deep-fried. More than enough to keep us all busy.

I cornered Angharad before she got caught up and,
against my better judgment, got her into a CL-based conversation. It was the
only way to make the talk I had in mind happen.

“Enid’s up for sneaking out with Cioran,” I said.
“From what she’s seen, it’s so he can hook up with people he’d rather not talk
about. He hasn’t told her too many details.”

“I suppose this is the burden of choice we bear
for bringing him into our company,” she said after a moment. “Do you fear as I
do?”

“What do you fear?” I was tempted to say
Tell
me what you fear, and I’ll let you know
, but the way I said it out loud
sounded less jokey to my own ears.

“That we will learn nothing by letting him roam freely.
Or that we might only learn something at the expense of our standing in the
conference.”

“We brought him on board because that was the
price he demanded of us for his information. There’s nothing that says we have
to
let
him slip his leash. He’s only here because he has a leash on in
the first place. Which, by the way, he made noises about having loosened.”

“You mean lifting his CL tap. Yes, that
stipulation I will have lifted. But there is one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

She lowered her glass and nodded across the room
at Ulli. Her projection and Cioran’s were in the middle of what sounded like
the two of them competing to retell the same joke.

“They are still very close,” Angharad said, “and
it takes no diplomat to sense that. Ulli has a very . . . parochial
sense of manners involving her friends, from all I have gathered. She thinks
poorly of the fact that the diplomatic contingents are to be ‘penned up’—her
words—in this compound, although we are scarcely being denied the right to move
freely.”

“Right—it’s more that everyone
else
is being
kept out.”

“I asked a few more questions in that vein, and I
gathered that for us to confine Cioran to the compound and continue tapping his
CL would be perceived by her as a slight. In the abstract, it would not affect
her ability to enjoy his company, as she could always come here.”

“But it wouldn’t help our position any. Is that
what you’re saying?”

“Yes. If we confine him and keep him under
surveillance, we damage our standing in her eyes for being martinets. If we let
him leave without our attention, his behavior may engender an incident. If we
let him leave under our watch, he may well cause an incident, but at least then
we stand a marginally better chance of defusing it before it erupts.”

“That and if he sneaks out under our watch, the
only way it’ll help us is if it’s with Enid.”

“Is leaving his tap in place not an option?” In a
more heavy-spirited tone: “I could always arrange some excuse to forestall
removing it.”

“We could leave it in place, sure, but it won’t give
us what we want. If we bug him and let him out on his own, his guard might never
come down. But if he’s out in the company of someone he has an
audience
for . . . you see my point? Whatever it is he wants to do, he wants to
share it
with someone. He’s nothing without an audience, you know that.
Enid is his one-girl audience.” I don’t like it either, I thought, but there it
is. He wants to show
her
something, most likely how clever and
spontaneous he is. He does it for everyone, of course, but when offered to her
it’s doubly rewarding for him.

“You find that disconcerting as well.”

“And you don’t?”

“No, I do. But I also know something else. As much
as I care for her, as much as I want to be there to bring her and her father
together, I know full well she will continue to make her own choices.”

“Even if they’re stupid ones?”

“The stupid ones most of all.” Damn her for
smiling when she said that.

“Well,” I said, “if something does happen, I hope
you have a
seriously
good speech ready.”

I left Angharad
—with all-too-deliberate
haste, I thought. I’d been expecting her to think about it and say no, and when
she hadn’t done that, I’d begun to feel myself squirm inside. Now that I had
her stamp of approval on the matter I wanted to put some breathing room between
us.

Why not torture myself further, I thought, and join
our two fine members of the IPS? They’d spent a good ten minutes screening the
food for safety, so they had no qualms about actually eating some of it. Even
Ioné had loaded a small plate; she was biting sidelong into one of the grilled
yams when I came to their attention.

“I thought that would be incompatible with you,” I
said.

“Incompatible, no. Not suitable as sustenance,
yes.”

“That is to say—she can eat it, but she gets
nothing from it.” Kallhander said this as he peeled apart one of what I took to
be the mandible-claws of a boiled pincener. That soft-shelled crustacean was
what the glowrey preyed on, and it served as a good example of what would
happen if a lobster and a small octopus were forced to share all the ugliest parts
of each other’s anatomy. “That hasn’t stopped her from trying things.”

I kept on in this vein out loud, but went
CL-private with the two of them and filled them in on Enid’s harvested bits of
intelligence. They concurred that Cioran had his own planetside agenda and that
he would attempt to fulfill it with our collective backs turned.

“It’s good of you not to want to expose Enid to
undue danger,” Ioné said. “But by her own admission, Cioran remains the only
one who trusts her to the degree needed to determine his true motives.”

“And you have
no
idea how much that bothers
me.”

“Is it because of her age?” Kallhander said. “Or
is there some other factor?” He was attempting, with some success, to sound
more sympathetic than nosy. Good for him, I thought; you only get better by
playing over your head.

“It’s a bunch of things,” I said. “Her being young
is just the headache on top of all of them. It doesn’t
help
, that’s for
sure. But it’s second to her being the last person I want being dragged into
the middle of something potentially explosive.”

“Barring her age, there has to be another factor.”
Ioné asked. She had the wide-eyed, puzzled look of a kid whose dog had died and
was struggling with the idea that whatever it was that had made it move simply
didn’t exist anymore.

 “If Cioran is involved in something, you know,
nefarious
,”
I said, “and it comes between what the two of them are trying to build, it’s
going to hurt. Don’t get me wrong—she’s not naïve enough to think Cioran’s
hands aren’t dirty in some way. It’s just that if whatever this is blows up and
comes between them, she’s going to take it out on
me
.”

“Is that all?” Kallhander said. I stopped within a
syllable of snapping at him. He was right, I thought. If we got out of this
intact save for her emotions being a little bruised, we could count ourselves
lucky.

And maybe, I went on, it might be the kind of
bruising she needed in the long run anyway. Wasn’t
she
the one who
wanted to be thought of as “one of us”, and not just a pet that was scooped up
along the way? Then maybe she ought to learn what that costs.

“Yeah,” I said out loud. “Good way to put it.”

Kallhander and Ioné both gave sober nods. Cosm around
us, I thought, they actually empathize.

“Some additional context might help,” Kallhander
said. “Cioran has a long list of known associates, a few present here on
Bridgehead. One which seems the most likely point of contact is a dealer in
protomic scrap.” He CLed me a file—I was long past flinching at such things
now—and I let it open passively while he continued. “In the last solar year, on
other worlds, Cioran has twice conducted in-person business either with him or
a direct associate of his. It’s safe to assume they would attempt another
contact here as well.”

“What kind of business?”

“That’s what’s puzzling. No money was exchanged at
either meeting.”

“That sounds either like old friends getting
caught up or something which isn’t about money.”

“That might be more likely. This scrap dealer,
Dragoji, has no criminal record as such but a long history of behavior
suggesting otherwise.”

“The most relevant behavior in his dossier,” Ioné said,
“is a series of losses incurred when bidding on a number of estate sales.”

The dossier told me the rest of the story
in re
DRAGOJI, ARSÈNI: born forty-five solar years ago; native to Bridgehead;
inherited family protomic reclamation business; branched out into collecting
and restoring antique and rare protomic structures . . . and, yes,
six separate incidents where he bid on the entire contents of some deceased’s
estate—all Highend up-tier immigrants—then hastily sold the contents in bulk
for a loss. The rest of his business appeared to be solidly profitable, which
made me understand Ioné’s comment. Nobody keeps throwing money after the same
kind of bad deals unless they’re expecting something else to happen.

“Well, he’s either the worst speculator in the
history of capitalism,” I said, “or he’s looking for something.”

Kallhander went me a step further. “Looking for
something at Cioran’s behest. But I find that difficult to believe without
money being exchanged.”

“Right. Nobody throws away that kind of money on
spec—no, not even for
Cioran.
So odds are it’s another connection that
money wouldn’t be a part of in the first place.”

“There’s little in the file to suggest that from
what I’ve seen. Certainly no blood relations or other social links.”

“No known history of violence, either,” Ioné said.
Her way of telling me to not feel like Enid might be going straight into the
lion’s mouth, I guessed.

“Look,” I said. “I vote for letting Cioran go off
and do his thing; that’s dead easy to ask for. But I’m only still
just
on this side of letting Enid go with him. I’m no more in the mood for a fiasco
than you are. If something
does
get all bent out of shape, you have my
full permission to swoop in and be heroes.”

“We scarcely need to ask permission,” Kallhander
said, and for once didn’t try to smile.

I excused myself from their company
—they
didn’t complain—and sought out what was happening on the other side of the
room. Angharad and Ulli were seated knee-to-knee, and a casual survey of their
CL broadcasts told me their conversation was engrossing enough to have winnowed
out everyone else. I joined anyway.

“—Yes, but why
her
?” Ulli was asking.
“Without wanting to sound critical, that Enid was the one you chose to aid, and
through the manner you described—it all seems rather arbitrary. What other
criterion might have been at work here?”

“If such a thing seems arbitrary to others,”
Angharad replied, “then even if I explain to them what motivated me, it will still
seem arbitrary to them. I will say there were both public and private reasons
for aiding Enid in her search. The public reason was nothing more than
recognizing, through this encounter, the opportunity to do something that to my
mind fell entirely to me to do. Such chances come rarely in life, and once
shirked they are never replaced. They may be approximated by something else
later on, but not repeated. For instance: you and I will never have
this
conversation again, and never again for the first time.”

“Of course, of course.” Ulli waved as if gesturing
for Angharad’s words to get out of the way. “But now by hinting at other
things, you’ve only stoked my curiosity for knowing them.”

“They are nothing I can speak of now. But they
will be things I can speak of before much longer.”

“If you were anyone else—” Ulli wet her voice with
her drink. “—see, I imagine I’ll be saying that a great deal!—If you were
anyone else, I’d say, ‘Why all the fuss over one girl and her father?’ And
what’s more, what if you come to her father and find there’s an entirely
different story from his mouth? Or what if there’s no father at all, and you’ve
simply been sent chasing dust-tails?”

Angharad waited a whole second of CL time before
answering. For someone who most likely hadn’t grown up with CL and used it only
when someone slapped a ‘hat on her head and made it deeply inconvenient
not
to, she handled it well.

“To do this,” Angharad said, “is nothing more than
the recognition of my responsibility. What became of her father . . .
you said before that it was not, strictly speaking, my
fault
. In most
anyone’s eyes I would owe her nothing because of her father’s own foolishness.
But I am not just ‘most anyone’, and I know this. Eyes are on me—hers, yours,
uncountable others alive now and innumerable more yet to be born. What I do is
for them as much as it is for her, for her father, and, last of all for myself.
I never had the luxury to pretend this was not my business.”