Flight of the Vajra (62 page)

The protomic shell around the kylix, dented on one
side from where it had landed, slowly filled itself back out. The kylix inside
was as untouched by all this as a fly in amber would be bothered by rain.

“Once I saw the possibilities,” Mylène said, grinning,
“I went on a bit of a tear and had the whole house preserved this way. This
stuff’s not easy to work with; I’m still ironing out a few bugs. But the size
and breadth of this collection demanded something . . . radical.
Plus, as you can plainly see, the original house was not a protomic creation
and didn’t lend itself to being reconstituted programmatically. My son thinks
I’m being sentimental, but I think he still has a few lessons to learn about
the value of a
little
judiciously-indulged sentimentality.”

Ioné knelt down and picked up the kylix. I’d been
too busy ogling the properties of the thing to pick it up, and in fact had
half-expected an extrusion from the floor to restore it to its pedestal. After
all, I’d lived for years in a house that was only marginally less automated
than that.

“You want some?” Mylène said. “You look like you
have more curiosity than you know what you do with. Go on, take it.” A bulb of
the stuff, about the size of my fist, extruded itself from the side of the
pedestal and broke off neatly in my hand. Just having it in my hands was a bad
distraction: much of how it worked its magic was by having a highly tunable
ductility index . . . which in turn meant it needed pretty regular
recharging to be useful, but also meant you could rapid-extrude everything from
a pillowy curve to a stiletto (albeit one made of glass). I flattened the lump
out into a puck that fit nicely in my jacket pocket and tucked it away before I
lost an afternoon to kneading it.

Enid’s attention had been captured by a view of the
pool beyond the window. Rising from the water was a young man in bathing
trunks. From the look of him—always an unreliable way to measure age—he was perhaps
only a few solar years older than Enid herself. His dark-eyed face resembled Mylène’s,
but with both a masculine bent and the kind of consciously-assumed detachment I
was used to seeing in the likes of Kallhander. He stepped onto a grate to one
side of the pool, let jets of warm air blow the water from his body, then shook
the last of the droplets from his close-cropped helmet of pageboy hair and
stepped out of view.

His CL ident put my questions to rest:
Marius
Astatke
.

—
Turned your head, did he?
I CLed Enid.

—
What? There’s nothing that says I can’t ogle,
is there?

It hit me just then how there had been no round of
actual introductions. None had been needed: our own CL idents had all done that
job for us. For once, I didn’t mind hustling past all those niceties.

“Officer,” Mylène said to Ioné, “would you mind
waiting in the adjoining lounge? Mr. Sim and I—”

“No need to explain anything, Madam Controller,”
Ioné said, and made herself scarce.

Mylène’s voice gained gloomy weight after the door
melded shut behind Ioné. “I’m also going to have to ask both of you to drop any
CL links you have to anything but each other,” she said. “Especially Ioné, or
any other officers.”

“You don’t trust the IPS?” I said. “I don’t think
they’re great dinner company either, but so far she and her partner are about
as trustable as they get.”

“Yeah—why trust
us
and not
them
?”
Enid said.

“Because you’ve been involved in a way they
haven’t. And can’t be.”

Mylène seated herself in the sunken lounge area,
and the two of us followed suit. The table in the center was made from a
cross-section of a petrified tree trunk—protomically laminated, of course, and
with a chute peeking up over one side that was for delivering refreshments. The
table had its own CL interface, and I decided the mere fact I was allowed
access to it meant I was free to help myself. I asked for whatever local
whiskey they had, straight up.

“I’m going to go out on a limb,” Mylène said,
reaching for her inhalerette, “and tell you that the municipal governments on
Bridgehead are nowhere nearly as cohesive in their opinions about immigration
as they want everyone to think. The conventional wisdom for this—make that the
conventional
off-world
wisdom—has the native Bridgeheaders up in their
eyries, looking down with a smile on all the little teeming Old Way types who
are climbing over each other to get a seat on the train to paradise. The
reality’s a little more . . . granular than that. The Bridgeheaders
could care less at this point who waits on them hand and foot, just as long as
they’re waited on. And within the ranks below them, there’s a lot of mixed
feelings. There’s former Old Way folks who have worked hard to earn a seat on
the train, and have no qualms about closing the doors to others now that
they’re on board. And then there’s mainly Highend folks—like me—who are not
what you’d call sympathizers, but we’ve been around enough and seen enough to
know a diverse population makes for a better population. We don’t want those
doors closed, because we know it’ll mean stagnation in the long run. Thing is,
we can’t talk about it too loudly, because we know that won’t help our
position. But we don’t want atavism for its own sake, either. And then above
all that there’s Prince Nancelares, who’s going to figure out once and for all
which way this planet is going to continue tilting. —Tell me something, Henré:
how much time have you spent with the Kathaya, exactly?”

Mylène had put away and taken back up her
inhalerette at least twice since she started talking. I had stopped counting
after two iterations.

My drink had arrived. It had appeared in the mouth
of the chute and been eased over towards my hands by the table’s own gently
undulating surface—almost like tugging at a tablecloth to bring the gravy boat
closer, I thought.

“Enough that we’re on a first-name basis,” I said.

“Everything I’ve heard is that she’s
. . . not as dogmatic as her predecessors.”

“She knows she has a job to do,” I said, “but she also
knows the old way of doing it, pardon the pun, isn’t going to be enough
anymore.”

“I don’t know about ‘dogmatic’ either,” Enid said,
“but she’s gone farther and done more for just me than almost anyone else I
know has. Save for Henré himself.”

“That’s the impression I’m getting,” Mylène said.
“That she understands that much more how these things are not just binary
options. It’s not about Old Way versus Highend. It’s about how the two of them
are going to be part of something larger, together. And most Highenders don’t
talk about it because they can’t. They don’t know how, or who to discuss it
with, without sounding defeatist. The mere
fact
that I’ve had children
biologically—even if I was both sire and mater—that’s becoming more and more of
a black mark on my own record. Or the fact that I’m grooming Marius so closely
instead of letting someone else, someone more ‘qualified’, do that work. It’s
the
idea
of having progeny that bothers them. I guess they think I’m
preparing him to be my successor, but they know full well they can choose
anyone they want for the position once my term expires. I don’t care about
that; I just want Marius to benefit from my direct guidance. The more I live,
the more I see firsthand how valuable that kind of thing is.” Her words were
tumbling out faster,

“Wait. Are you talking about
re-embodiment
?”
I said.

“No, no no no. I’m not going to do that to him. He
deserves to be his own person, not just an . . . appendage for my
consciousness, or a husk for me to co-inhabit with him. I’m not going to demand
that I cram myself into him and share his corpus, and that any children he has
will be the same kind of vessel. I’ve seen what that leads to; it’s a dead end.
Anyone who has the sense to see it for what it is knows it’s a dead end. And
besides, it’s
his
body. I sired him so he could do with that body, and
that mind, as he chose. That’s another of the things I do believe that puts me
at odds with a lot of other people here, as you can guess. I don’t agree with
the Old Way about a whole lot, but I do on this one issue.”

“Which is?” Enid said.

“
 
‘Everything
dies and nothing dies.’
 
”

I put my drink down, hard enough for the liquid
inside to slosh against my fingers. When a Highender quotes from the Cycle of
Grace, I told myself, you’re well within your rights to wonder if they should
be called a Highender in the first place. So what
do
you call them? I
thought, and had no answer.

“Those aren’t the only reasons
I feel
at odds with my fellow councilmen,” Mylène went 9n, “but they’re among the
biggest, and they go a long way towards explaining why I feel like I haven’t
been getting the whole picture about a few things. Everyone insists I’m not
being kept out of the loop on anything, though. But all that’s done is raise my
suspicions all the more.”

“Examples?” I said.

“When Arsèni was arrested, his assets were frozen
and his books audited. I didn’t get to see the whole thing—jurisdiction, so
they tell me—but they did forward me some things that had relevance to my job. Turns
out he’d made a few improvements to that shop of his. As in, he’d been in the
process of reprogramming the entire inner protomic service wall of that
building. That’s a violation of construction code that dwarfs any of the alleged
safety issues with his leaning towers of shelving.”

I felt a lot of hairs I didn’t even know I had all
starting to stand on end. “How come the IPS didn’t know about this?” I said.

“They do now. We confirmed it for ourselves a bit before
you showed up.” And what with my external CL interface off, I thought, it’s no
surprise I haven’t heard anything.

“What was he reprogramming the building
into
?”
Enid asked.

“That’s the thing. We’re not sure. I’ll show you
what we scraped together before we froze its programming. We had a copy of his
master property programming key held in escrow, but I suspect at least one of
the things he was preparing to do was—”

“—change the locks on the door,” I said. “And
leave you with a structure that only he could program and modify.”

“That sounds about right.” Mylène said. “Now,
consider this. If something that radical, that dangerous, was going on right
under all our noses—what
else
is going on? What else am I not aware of?”

“There’s a chance none of this is about you,” I
said. “It sounds more like everyone’s being duped about equally.”

“I could live with that a lot more easily than I
could live with the idea that I’m being systematically shut out of this for
whatever reason.” She reached for the inhalerette one more time, then sighed
and drew her hand back. “That’s why I needed a second opinion, one as far
outside my circle as I could get. Both for an opinion about what it was he was
building, and whether or not I’m being stonewalled.”

“I guess even after five years of being off the
map my name still carries some weight.”

“Henré, there’s never been a time when your name
didn’t
carry weight. And believe me, I wouldn’t be putting something like this in your
lap if I didn’t think it was warranted.”

I knocked back the rest of the drink—it was like
swallowing burning tree sap, but at least it lit up the right neurons—and
offered the empty glass back to the same chute it had come from. “Only thing
is,” I said, “I’m liable to share whatever you give me with the IPS folks I’m
sort of shacked up with right now. If I don’t do that, it could get messy.”

“You mentioned you trusted them.” She sounded
uncheered.

“As much as I’m able to trust anyone who is
authorized to shoot me if I get unruly, yes. Let’s face it, I thought the whole
reason you pulled me into this was because what we’d seen would make us
exploitable if you decided to take that tactic.”

“Exploitable,” Mylène said with a mirthless smile.
“I gave you that impression, didn’t I?” She leaned back as far as the projection
of the couch would allow, which turned out to be pretty far indeed, and gave
the ceiling the same look. “It was pretty convincing, wasn’t it? And I might
just have turned some thumbscrews on you if the need reared its head. But I’d
rather not get to that point.” She turned her head to let Enid look her in the
eyes. “The word I hear is, you’re an acrobat?”

This shift of direction in the conversation—not a
very deft one by any standard of etiquette—freed me up to receive the file
package Mylène had waiting for me. Aside from a full schematic dump of Arsèni’s
warehouse, there was also an integration diagram to show how the building was
meant to patch into the municipal protomic grid—both before and after his
modifications.

“I was with a traveling troupe,” Enid said, but I
didn’t hear another word because I was too busy gaping at the
After
diagram. The substrate feed had been completely rerouted: instead of there
being one main inlet and a bunch of capillary feeders running up the length of
the building, the inlet had just been extended to run in a spiral up the entire
inside wall of the building. You didn’t do that unless you were—what? Turning
the entire building into a protomic silo?

—
Mylène, can we let Officer Ioné back in here
and turn on the outside links?
I CLed.
I need to share this with them,
now
.

—
Only if you’re positive they’re going to do
right by all of us with it.

—
On my mother’s lantern! Look, you can’t keep
something like this close to your chest, no matter who else you think is
scurrying around under the covers making things difficult for you personally.

—
Henré, no lectures about trust. Right now, out
of all the people I trust, most of them are here in this building right now. Go
ahead and bring Officer Ioné in; I’ll restore the outside links.