Flight of the Vajra (60 page)

“Even Enid?”

“With Enid, it’s . . . different. She’s
‘one-down’ from me. I recognize that. It’s rather humbling to have someone
offer so much of themselves to you, and in a way you never imagined you’d share
with someone else. It’s not as if I’ve never engineered creative collaborations
with others, mind you. It’s that I’ve never been in the position of, well,
mentor
,
as it were. I find I rather like it. That and the way she walked right up to me
and more or less demanded to be treated as a peer. Most people aren’t that
forthright.”

You’re not the only one she’s done that to, I
thought. “And with Ulli?” I said.

“With Ulli? I’m the one that’s one-down. And I
. . . I enjoy it, sir. I stand in her presence and I feel her
ambition, her sense of purpose . . . all of a variety and quality I
could never hope to engender on my own. When I met her, I wondered myself what
it was that drew me so fiercely to her. It wasn’t until the first time I
subjugated
myself to her that I understood.
Subjugation
; that’s a word suited to
Old Way hierophants, not a transcender of ways like me! I do not ‘subjugate’
myself to anyone! I stand aloft, I draw the eyes and ears of others, always. —At
least, that is, until she came along and showed me how much purpose there could
be in it. The kind of purpose that you know only you alone will ever understand
or assign significant to.”

“Starts with an ‘L’,” I said.

“Yes!
Love!
What a fine thing it is to be
helplessly in love, isn’t it? I don’t need to tell you what an ecstasy it is,
or why. There she is, right in front of you, so separate from you and yet at
the same time completely intertwined with you, even with your CLs both turned
off.” He laughed at that before I could. “Y’see, when I let myself be kicked
off my homeworld, I only did it half out of the sense that I was shirking the
Highend ways of that society for some undiluted taste of the Old Way. I wanted
to take from both of those paths all the things that raised my eyebrows. But it
wasn’t until I blundered into Ulli’s life that I took seriously this business
of Old Way love-and-be-loved. Amongst the Highend, you know how they pride
themselves for being such lofty, evolved lovers. ‘We love because we
can
,
not because we
must
.’
 
”
(Amanika again, I thought.) “And now, I had firsthand evidence of what it was
like to love because you had to, not simply because you willed it. For such a
feeling you are willing to do most anything, to disadvantage yourself, to make
new kinds of ruin for yourself that never existed before, all for the sake of
that feeling.”

Not
the person
, I thought. The
feeling.

“It’s not she who ‘puts my ass on a string and
jerks it around’, Henré,” Cioran said. “It’s
me
. I lasso myself thus,
and then I offer her that string. And if you want to, you can place that into
the same category as all the other things I do to be labeled a clown in public.
It will sit there in good company.”

He sat back, reached for his polylute, and laid it
across his lap. I let him start playing—I even enjoyed the way it sounded like
the music was bubbling up from under our feet like time-lapse grass growing. It
didn’t stop me from talking.

“What if she’s wrong about all this?” I said.

“Did the spirit of all I just said completely
elude you? This isn’t about whether or not she’s
right
, Henré. Although
if you ask me, I’m convinced she’s more right than any of us alone can know.”

“I’ll save my blind faith until the lab report
comes back on that drive module.”

“It’s not as if you haven’t been cultivating your
own species of blind faith! You think for a minute Enid would favor you over me
if she had the choice, for instance? Or that she isn’t as opportunistic as any
of the rest of us? More so than many of us, I’d daresay. Being younger, she’s
more lost to a sense of shame about such things than we might be. After all,
wasn’t that how you two met in the first place?”

That was how we met
, I wanted to say,
but
that’s not how things remained
.

“What she does with her life is her business,” I
said out loud, “and I’ve never kidded myself about that. If she’d rather go
gallivanting off with you once this is all over, you think I’m going to be able
to stand in her way for more than two seconds?”

“But
will
you?”

“And Angharad wouldn’t be thrilled about it
either. Enid herself made a point of having unfinished business with her. You
heard all that with your own ears.”

“It must pain you to hold so much back,” he said,
“and out of who knows what sort of principles. If she threw herself at me, what
reason would I have to refuse her? Tell me, do you admire yourself for carrying
around so much silly Old Way baggage? Worries about your reputation still got
you down? Or is it that you worry about Angharad frowning on you from her
pedestal? Or your wife shaking her head at you from beyond the veil somewhere?
Oh, no, wait—” He stood up just as I did, although not nearly as violently as
me. “—I’ve gotten it all wrong, haven’t I? It’s about picking up where you left
off with your little girl. Keeping her safe from all the things you never got a
chance to keep her safe from, except that she’s already blown past you and
started living her own life. So frustrating, to never get a chance to be a
proper father!”

I assumed he was still smiling as he spoke those
last couple of words, because by then I couldn’t see a damn thing. Everything
had become a swimming glaze of tears, which took their sweet time to leave my
eyes and slide down my burning face.

By the time I could see again, Cioran was no
longer smiling. He’d let his polylute slide off his lap and had stopped playing
at some point during his speech.

“That’s why you insisted so many times, ‘It’s her
life’,” he went on. “Or something to that effect. You weren’t telling any of us
such things. It was so that you’d believe it all the more. But you don’t really
believe it, do you?”

“No,” I said. Only the “o” seemed to come out, no
thanks to my throat feeling so closed-over. “But I have to act like I do, for
both our sakes.” I ran my fingers across my damned leaky eyes. “It’s not like
she doesn’t know. She knows; she knows everything you give her credit for
knowing. One thing she is not is stupid.” Cioran’s own words, now coming out of
my mouth. “And I’m not standing in her way because she deserves better than to
have someone playing Dad for her.”

“Even if she’s elected to let you take the job?”

“I don’t
want
the job,” I just about shouted
at him. “She has a father. It’s not my job to have in the first place. It’s my
job to get them—”

“You see the problem, then.” Cioran put his
polylute back across his lap, but didn’t play. “I can see, very clearly, that
she wants you to take that job. Because she knows I’m no good for that role.
She’ll follow me, like you said, but not because I can give her such a thing. I
am a collaborator, remember? Maybe even a creative mentor. But not a leader
like Angharad would be, or a . . . a father. At least, not in her
eyes.”

I sat down myself.

“I can’t be you,” he went on, “and . . .
I don’t
want
that job! Just as you say you don’t want the job of being
her father, when her father might not even exist anymore as she remembered him!
If she decides I’m more important than anything else, I’ll be very happy, I
won’t lie about that. But . . . I’ll be that much more disappointed in
you
, if you
don’t
do anything.”

I looked up. He wasn’t sneering, or taunting, or
twisting anyone’s words (including his own). He was looking at me with the
hungry expectation of someone waiting for the few words that would set him free.

“I’ll take the job,” I said. “But only until it’s
mine to give back up again.”

“Thank you,” he said, and for the first time ever I
believed him completely.

I stepped out onto the balcony
and
enjoyed the sight (and scent) of the water shining out to the horizon for all
of seven seconds before someone tried to CL me. This wasn’t coming through my
generic public CL interface, but rather my private one. The public one was
still being bombarded with everything from idiotic gossip to long, sincere
messages asking me to stop wasting my time and talent on “moldering icons of
the Old Way”. (That last one had at least been good for a mordant laugh.)

The name on the most recent connection attempt told
me everything:
Mylène Astatke.

—
Mylène!
I CLed.
I was going to talk to
you directly about your invite; I just got distracted. —Wait, how did you get
this connection?

—
It’s the same private connection ident you’ve
always had, Henré! I gambled on it being live on the planetary grid, what with
you around and in some very tony company!

—I don’t know if “tony” is the right adjective
for someone like Angharad. “Auspicious” is more like it, maybe?
(Especially
when that word was coming from the mouth of a Highender, I thought to myself.)

—Definitely auspicious. And influential. Last
place I would have expected you to turn up, honestly.

I took a moment to authorize a full-sensory
connection, something I’d asked Kallhander to give me permission to do the
other night. After all the hassle I went through talking to Anjai, I’d decided
as long as I was here on Bridgehead I might as well make dealing with anything
CL-based as unobnoxious as possible. Yes, I liked going for a walk, but not for
the sake of defeating the villa’s firewall every time someone called me.

Mylène had Angharad’s spindly physique, but she
was a good head or more taller, her smiles had more bite to them, and her gaze was
far more restless. And in place of Angharad’s patience and reserve, she sported
ambition and flamboyant confidence. She kept her hair short all around except
for a queue that went straight down her back and was wrapped in black ribbon,
and she still sported the cocoa-colored skin, broad and deep eyes, and
prominent nose I’d all remembered.

She was also gendermute—same as Cioran, switchable
on the fly, although in her case it was an after-the-fact customization she’d
performed once she’d hit age of consent on her world. The “she” was only there
because she nominally identified as female, something that had been made clear while
at her previous job since she’d been in at least one mating circle with a few
other folks. With such a thing, multiple partners took a given gender for the
sake of either siring or bearing offspring; after a few procreational
go-rounds, about half of the people in such circles picked a gender and stuck
with it. The fact she’d been in a mating circle at all put her at a slightly
lower end of Highend. On her homeworld, procreation still had a classy, exotic,
I-can-afford-to-take-the-time-and-effort-to-do-this flavor to it—even if that
was nothing more than a sentiment people had the luxury to preserve. Another of
the ways, I thought, Highend and Old Way are more alike than they admit, but
you’d have a terrible time getting either side to cop to it.

“So they’ve stuck you and the rest of the
Kathaya’s party in this cell block?” She peered down at the beach.

“If it’s a cell block, it’s got the best amenities
of any jail around.” I gestured out at the water. “I keep telling myself I
should try wind-surfing if we ever get the time—maybe after all this is over
I’ll take a day off and do that.”

“You? Take a day off? You’ve been out of
circulation for five years. I would have assumed you’d be making up for lost
time. What’ve you been up to, besides lending your services to the odd
pontiff?”

Odder than you know, I thought. “That’s all pretty
recent stuff. Everything before that was—well, I’ve just taken to calling it my
sabbatical.”

“Sounds like your sabbatical’s over, then.”

“Over and done with. —So is this about the party
later?”

“It is, but I decided to extend a more personal
invite to you. You plus however many you want to bring for early lunch, with
the party afterwards.”

“Your place?”

“Naturally.”

The censorship layer in the CL exchange for the
villa didn’t let her see inside our apartments—from her point of view, the
glass doors were one-way mirrored. If I wanted to show her anything inside, I
had to unlock it piecemeal. She had some fun with that by pretending to peer at
her reflection and adjust her hair.

“Any particular reason I got singled out for the
royal treatment?” I said.

“Getting caught up with you, for one.”

“As long as it isn’t about anything happening here,”
I said. I’d been meaning to say something of that nature since we started
talking, but she’d given me a fine way to do it without sounding peevish.

“After what happened with Dragoji? I’m amazed they
didn’t kick out you and everyone else in your party after that. Especially
since . . . ” She leaned in—once again body language takes over where
words fail, I thought—“I heard a, uh, markedly different story about what
happened than the sanitized version that was released publicly, Henré. But I
have plenty of reasons for parroting back the sanitized versions if I’m asked
about it.”

“What story
did
you hear?”

“That your flamboyant friend was looking for
contraband protomics of some kind and got a lot more than just an illegal
program or three. Got himself nearly bisected for his trouble.”

“That sort of thing’s your jurisdiction anyway,
isn’t it? Security?”

“Infrastructure, and the securing thereof. What
happens
inside
the buildings is generally only my business if it’s city
property. But I don’t close my ears to what goes on when it’s waved under my
nose and labeled ‘FYI’. I don’t
talk
about it, but I don’t close my ears
to it.”