Flight of the Vajra (58 page)

Angharad reached up and took Enid’s hands in her
own.

“Because I do not know what I am anymore,” she
said slowly, “and this is how I am to find out.”

She kept on going before I could find a way to
implore her otherwise.

“And in truth, this is not all that different from
the calculated risks I have taken in the past. I have done far more dangerous
things on far shorter notice—and I have less of a reason now than ever to stop
doing so. No one except you few know that I left the Old Way in ruins behind me
when I departed from Kathayagara. And there remains a chance, however small,
that no one will ever know. If it becomes clear it is impossible to leave the
Old Way behind and bring something truly new into being to replace it, then I
know now I must do that. But until the proof becomes overwhelming—”

“Angharad, you don’t have enough brain cells
online to think this through right now,” I said. “Get some rest.”

“No—please, hear me out.” Angharad tightened her
fingers around Enid’s, which only made Enid look all the more sad—not
frightened, just dismayed that someone so close could be in such irresolvable pain.
Enid worked one of her hands loose and started smoothing down Angharad’s hair
with it as the other woman went on. “To take these very risks—this is what I
am. I know this now. I must try, foolish as I might seem to be in trying. Or I
can go back and die with the rest of the Old Way—but why not see where there
might be a way forward first? In this, in these very sorts of things, there is
our way forward. Can you not see that?” Tears fell and made dark, jagged streaks
on the front of her robe, as if painted there by a baby’s fingertips. “Without
these things, what is there for me to be?”

Enid had her arms around the other woman before I
could do it. It made for an awkward three-way hug, with my arms around both of
them at once, but in a moment like that I didn’t care about awkward.

Angharad stood there, shaking slightly against
both of us, letting us draw the sorrow out of her. “Forgive me,” she said
without raising her head, and then a moment later she raised her head, sniffled
hard, and said it again. “Forgive me, I’ve let all this get the better of me
. . . I’ve let this mission overwhelm me.” She murmured a few more
broken phrases in this vein, nodding, which we both replied to with nothing
more than our own nods. “But, do answer me—am I wholly wrong? Is it wrong of me
to try?”

“No,” I said, “no, it isn’t. It’s not
wrong
;
it’s just—”

I fumbled for my next words, but Enid found
something that fit better: “There’s got to be other ways to try.”

That put me back on track.

“Nobody’s going to think any less of you,” I said,
“if you just stick to the mission that’s in front of you. Not me, not anyone
else in this party, not the cops, not your people. Whoever ‘your people’ turn
out to be when this is all over. Nobody that
matters
is going to care.
And if it feels like right now you don’t even know who those people are, or who
they’re turn out to be—that was how I felt for years on end, remember? Now that
I’m here, and there’s a few people close by that I think are good examples of
who such folks are going to be . . . I don’t worry about it anymore.
And neither should you.”

Enid and I both let go—tentatively, ready to close
our arms back around her in case she wavered and tilted over. Angharad stood on
her own, and while she did seem slightly unsteady on her feet she soon lifted
her chin and looked as composed as she had the first time I’d stood (and sat,
and knelt) in her presence.

“You really can’t
not
do this, can you,”
Enid said. She knew what a look like that meant: it was Angharad gathering her
strength for some coming storm.

“If you know you’re just going to lose sleep over
it,” I said, “then by all means do it. But don’t give it any more effort than
it really deserves. Trust me on this. Someone like that isn’t worth more than
an hour of your time.”

That’s for her to decide, isn’t it? I told myself
in the second after I’d said it, but she nodded at both of us all the same.

“No more than an hour,” she promised us, “and no
obsessing over the results.”

“
Especially
no obsessing,” Enid said. “Like
you haven’t got enough you’re obsessed with already!”

I shook my head. “Knowing her, I think she’d say
that was her job.”

“Henré, you are quite correct.” Angharad gestured
as if to embrace both of us again, but it was actually a farewell gesture; she
began to step backwards out of the room. “There is very little that will not
convince me that such things are not my sacred duty. But you did remind me that
as few as they may be, they do exist . . . and I must remain watchful
for them.”

“Good luck,” we both said as she closed the door.

Enid leaned her head against the small of my back
and groaned. “I swear, her heart’s going to explode if she keeps this up. And
don’t you tell me ‘that’s how she wants it’! Even she shouldn’t have to want
something like that. —But I know she’s just going to do it all anyway, do it
her way and cosm take anyone else worrying.” A long pause, then: “I wish I was
like that.”

“I think we are,” I said. “In our own ways.”

Enid changed back out of her new outfit,
wished
me a cursory good night, and went to bed. I tried to do the same thing, and I
deliberately let all of the most exhausting parts of the day roll back and
forth through my head. What I should have been doing, what Angharad should be
doing—

Oh, cosm, I hate “should”,
Cavafy had said
to me once.
I hate “should”; it’s the worst word ever. All it does it fill
your head with things that don’t exist yet. But that’s also what it’s for—to
tempt you, to make you ask, why
doesn’t
this exist? Why not, except for
me sitting here and choosing to do nothing? That’s how you and me are alike, I
think. We let something like that lodge inside of us, and we can’t just let it
lie there. We, of all people, know we can’t do nothing.

He had been drunk when he said that. I had been
drunk, too, and I’d believed him.

I was deathly sober now and I still believed him.

I pulled out the scraps recovered from the
Kyritan
and the Cytherian coup and re-opened the simulation for them. It felt like
years since I’d taken a good look at it—more than enough subjective time for a
fresh perspective, I told myself. Pull it out, look it over until my eyelids
droop.

There it was again: the shroudlike structure, just
big enough for a man but clearly not intended as a trauma module or something
along those lines. Or maybe, I thought, it accepts a human body
but not for
those reasons
. Fine: let’s give it a human body, mine, and see what
happens. I sent the simulation a copy of my physiology and waited. Nothing.
Ramped up the clock speed of the sim to one hundred times normal; still
nothing. Probably still too broken to get anything really useful from, I
thought; until I can get a full restoration of the original program from enough
different sources, I’m going to be poking in the dark.

Wait, stop. What’s it reacting to? It
is
reacting to something, after all—no, not
me
, but my
clothes
.
Trying and failing to do something with it. I went in closer, down to the
bridge/interface level and saw something that rang a whole lot of bells: it was
attempting to make cellular connections in a way that reminded me of how
unprogrammed raw substrate was accessed by a programming bus. Trying and
failing, because my clothes weren’t unprogrammed substrate, of course.
So
give it some, you idiot, and see what happens.

Add one simulated kilo of type A. Simmer for a few
million clock cycles. Stir occasionally. Don’t let it stick.

Watching raw unprogrammed substrate acquiring new
programming from up close, even in a simulation, never stops taking my breath
away. Maybe not the best thing to do when you’re actually trying to get some
sleep, but I’d long since pushed aside thoughts of a good night’s rest.
Filigrees and receptors extended towards each other between each cell of
substrate, and the cells themselves shifted between each other as they flattened
out into sheets or weave themselves into polyhedra. Corrugations deepened in
surfaces; threads of cells spooled themselves into the same spirals I imagined
Achitraka House being unpacked and extruded from. I set the simulation to
single-step mode and let it run like that for I don’t know how long, just to
watch every slow step in that dance.

Back to work, I told myself after a moment, and
restored the simulation to full speed.

My diligence wasn’t rewarded. The initial spurt of
activity I’d seen on introducing the substrate into the empty container wasn’t
followed up by anything I could discern. Not by just looking, and not by A/Bing
the present and previous state machines either. Odds are I’d once again run up
against the fact that I was dealing with a partial and painstaking
reconstruction of harvested data, and that there was just too much missing for
it to continue with its own program.

For long moments I stared at the undulating wall
of simulated cells, which had wound down their squirming and were now in a
holding pattern that looked like it would repeat indefinitely.

Thanks for playing Casino Protomica. Come back
again soon.

I registered, however distantly, the CL chime for
the suite’s front door, which indicated Angharad had returned. Only an hour and
a half local time had gone by; she’d at least been true to her word about not
staying out too late.

I didn’t even bother changing out of my
single-piece pajamas. I just stumbled into the front foyer and gave poor Angharad
a jolt. Never mind that her ’hat was off; she looked half-blind with exhaustion
and probably wouldn’t have paid attention to any presence telemetry sent
through it anyway.

“Henré!” She took one of my hands in both of hers.
“You look awful. Have you slept?”

“No. And you don’t look all that great yourself
either. What happened?”

“I did talk to him. He was on
restricted-visitation status, but they allowed me some time with him. I was
even permitted to record the event via CL, but I decided against it, and I told
him as much. I put the ’hat on the table in the interrogation room and told him
it was disabled and that I had no CL of my own, and he said ‘No, of
course
you don’t,’ or something to that effect. The sensory surfaces in the room were
all active, of course, but I imagined any gesture of trust on my part would be
well-received.”

There was an ottoman against one wall in the foyer,
and rather than go back inside we both sank down on it with Angharad leaning
into me as she did so. She came dangerously close to slumping completely over
and putting her head in my lap.

“So what did he say?” I said. “Other than cheap
shots about you having no CL, that is.”

“He was . . . remarkably talkative. Talkative
and suspicious at the same time, which means it was difficult to say if he said
anything useful. He began by complaining about his business being wrecked,
about the amount of thankless hard work he had poured into the collection he’d
assembled over the years . . . ‘There’s insurance,’ he said, ‘but
money isn’t the same thing as the fruit of the work itself.’ And if a
conviction was registered against him, the insurance would not cover anything.
I interrupted him, much as I empathized with him—”

“Is there anyone you
don’t
empathize with?”
I said. I had been stroking her shoulder, and on realizing this I stopped
moving my hand, even though she hadn’t seized up or objected.

“I make it my work to see something in everyone
that can be empathized with. This you know, Henré. So, yes, even this man
Arsèni I empathized with, without also approving of his actions. Through that I
thought it might be possible to make the connections that would prove valuable
to all of us—him included.”

“So what came next?”

“I asked him if there was anything that might put
his actions into a better context. He hesitated, then said no. I told him that
should he change his mind, there would be plenty of people willing to hear him
out and perhaps exchange what he knows for protection. He then said something I
found at least as interesting as Kallhander and Ioné did: ‘
If I told you,
even you wouldn’t want to protect me.
’
 
”

“I guess he clammed up hard after that.”

“He was very upset for having admitted that much.
I did say that I am only a woman, after all, and not a god; even I can only do
so much. But all the same, I think my presence did have an effect on him. ‘
Even
you’
, he had said.”

“And even if he was being sarcastic—”

“—it still had the flavor of something said in
earnest.”

 “What can I say except that I hope you’re right?
Well, that and ‘Thank you’. Although, again . . . it’s always you who
ends up sticking her neck out so damn far, and not just because you ‘should’.
So unfair. And speaking of unfair—I got so much closer to unlocking that stupid
sample.” I squeezed some air with my thumb and forefinger. “This close to
figuring out what it does, and then I hit
another
wall . . . ”

“You will break through that wall in due time.”

“It’s stupid, isn’t it? All the clues are right
there, in one little package, and the only thing keeping me from them is
math
.”
I shook my head. “And the only way to get through it is to beat my head against
it, over and over. —You know, part of me always understood at arm’s length what
was so appealing about Highend life. So many of the nagging problems and
questions are just
settled
, over, done with. There’s nothing for you to
have to beat your head against. You don’t worry about losing someone because,
well, you never really lose anyone or anything. But some other part of me, the
part the Old Way was responsible for, that part says, ‘No—you know that doesn’t
work; you know it’s only going to hide the real problems instead of solving
them.’ Even when I was out on my own, I still told myself that—even when I
didn’t really feel like I was acting on it. I was waiting for a chance to act
on it with a whole heart again.” I felt my mouth smile, then the rest of my
face follow. “I guess it’s turning out to be worth it after all. I don’t know what
kind of person I’d be without something to struggle with. It might as well be
this.”