Flight of the Vajra (67 page)

—Just stay frosty and local,
I CLed.
If
that Farhouad picks a fight with you, back down. Even if it hurts.

—Farhouad? He’s not picking a fight. He’s just
trying to satisfy his curiosity, like so many other Formynxi who know nothing
about me except what they’re told.

I heard a tiny yelp next to me. Angharad was now standing
on tiptoes as Diamond wound around the backs of her legs. She had her amazingly
long tail wrapped around the front of Angharad’s shins, and so the poor woman
had flinched in the only direction left: up. Angharad
eep
ed again.

“Diamond,
easy
!” Mylène insisted. To
Angharad: “It’s all right—whenever strangers show up, it’s like this. First she
sulks, then she tries to get to know everyone at once.”

“I was merely surprised. And I was about to step
away and get something to eat.”

“You seem preoccupied! Why don’t I save you the
trip?” Ulli reached around from behind Angharad and placed in her hand a tall
glass of unsweetened iced tea. Angharad turned—tried to, anyway, as Diamond was
now sprawling on top of her feet and enshrouding her legs as high as halfway up
her shins—and gave Ulli a smile that I didn’t think I was ever going to figure
out if it was forced or not.

“I thought you and Angharad would have been sick
of seeing each other by now,” I said. I knelt down and did my best to coax
Diamond away, which wasn’t much of a best; all she did was look at me with
distant annoyance.

“Me? Sick of her? Never!” Ulli said. “Also, we
were both preoccupied with breakout discussions—subsets of the main roundtable conference.
We were about to reconvene for a general roundtable session when that silly
alarm rang and everyone was ordered out for the day.”

Mylène raised a finger from the rim of her glass
.
“In my defense, Ulli, that ‘silly alarm’ might have saved lives. I’ve erred on
the side of caution every day I’ve been on this job and I’m not about to stop.”

“And I wouldn’t dare argue you out of doing so!
Besides, there’s been talk of extending tomorrow’s session hours to compensate
for it; I fully supported that measure.”

“As did I,” said Angharad. “Consensus about what
to do does not seem difficult to reach.
How
to accomplish it, on the
other hand—”

“—that will take some finessing, yes. But let’s
not fill our ears with shop talk just now! Are you still anchored to the floor?
My goodness, that animal loves you to death and back. Let me run off and fetch
you something.” Ulli banked her body and mailed herself between my back and
someone else’s, just missing Diamond’s vigorously-slapping tail.

“I . . . understand you are in charge of
the city’s protomic infrastructure,” Angharad said to Mylène.

“And I understand you’re in charge of the
spiritual guidance of a few trillion people!” Mylène twisted off the end of a
new inhaler. “I hope this doesn’t sound like an insipid question, but how
. . .
do
you fulfill a position like that without going
absolutely mad? The pressures involved, I can’t even begin to get a grasp on
them.”

“Let me answer that by asking a similar question,”
Angharad said. “I imagine your own work provides no small amount of stress.
What is it in your own life that provides you with refuge from those
pressures?”

“My son.” She tilted her head backwards towards
the pool. “And I know full well that’s something a lot of other people on my
social stratum and in my social circles wouldn’t say, but I’m tired of
pretending otherwise. When you choose to do certain things, they change you,
and you don’t always come out of the other side of those changes being able to
see how you went in. I’ve sired others before, and I’ve engendered others
before, but Marius . . . well, after he came along, things were
different for me. Much of that was instigated when his biological father backed
out. He suddenly decided he wasn’t interested in the work involved in grooming
an heir he’d contracted to sire in the first place.”

“Does this happen often?” Angharad said. She’d
managed to ease herself onto the edge of the couch by degrees, but Diamond
seemed determined to keep her feet cozy.

I had a ready-made answer, but I let Mylène speak:
“More often than a lot of people at parties like this want to talk about,
that’s for sure. I could have given my son up, but I didn’t want to do that. I
wanted to make him mine, so he could then in turn become his own. I didn’t
advertise this, I didn’t brag about it. I just went and did it, and I had
remarkably few people come to me and twist my arm about it. When people see you
just
doing
something, not
justifying
anything about it, they
assume you have your reasons, and they close their mouths. That’s the way it
should be.”

Another way to explain why Angharad had brought
Cioran along, I thought. Or why she had done most anything else.

“What if you were to lose your son?” Angharad
said.

Mylène shook her head. “I’m not thinking about
that part of it right now. I think about what we can accomplish together, not
what I’d lose by not having him. If it happens, I’ll cry about it then. I don’t
win over many people—many of
my
people, anyway—by saying these things.
But at least they know better now than to argue with me about it all. You, of
all people, I think you would understand.”

“I believe I do. You are, I take it, prepared to
embrace the Highend habit of extending one’s life, but only provided it does
not leave you with that many more years with that much less to do in them.”

“Oh, but that’s just the thing!” Ulli called out
over Angharad’s shoulder. “It’s the very
fact
that you have that many
more years that gives you that much more to do in them. Here, a little
something for everyone.” She placed three plates on the table, all of which
according to the CL-tags built into the plates were things I hadn’t ever
imagined eating by myself, let alone in front of others. Well, the stuffed
grape leaves seemed tame enough, but I knew I couldn’t make a whole meal out of
those—and besides, it was Angharad who was reaching for them first.

“The more I hear about this kind of thing,” I said
to everyone, “the more it breaks down into two points of view. On the one hand,
there’s having a life so that you can fill it with certain things. On the other
hand, there’s having certain things which you then fill your life
with
.
Key difference there. The first one sounds like what Ulli’s saying, and Cioran,
too. The second sounds like Angharad and Mylène. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

“Oh, no—it sounds like you’re quite on track,”
Ulli said. “But again, I have to ask: what else is life
for
but to be
filled? I don’t turn my nose up at someone who pushes things off their plate,
so to speak, and says ‘Not for me!’ Rather, I feel
sad
for them; I pity
them for only feeling their lives are meant to contain so much and no more.
Only the most cretinous of wretches would be indifferent towards Mylène losing
a son. But I would not—I cannot—let any one thing stand in the way of me and a
life completely lived.”

“Now, I’m not saying a life without my son isn’t
worth living,” Mylène said. “A life without my son wouldn’t be what I
wanted
,
that’s for certain. And if someone gets that much more from life because of
what look like small things, what’s wrong with that?”

“Not a thing wrong with it! It’s only when those
things are made into the bricks and mortar of a whole society, that’s when it
becomes problematic. It’s when utter fulfillment cannot be achieved by any
other means than such single-pointed things.”

“But what other sort of utter fulfillment is
there?” Angharad said.

“Many others! If only you let yourself see them!”

“But that all comes down to whether or not they’re
worth anything to you in the first place,” I said. “Does anyone else here, save
maybe Mylène, get as big a kick out of protomic engineering as I do? And not
just in the sense of standing back and admiring it, ‘oh, that’s nice, yeah, I
like that,’ but sitting there
every single day
with something of it in
your hands?”

“Can’t say I do,” Cioran said, leaning in from
behind me. “Nice hobby, but I wouldn’t want to work there.”

“And I don’t think these are things you can plan,
either,” I went on. “Either on your own or for a whole society. You just have
to leave the door open as wide as you can. Some people will walk through that
door and some won’t. There’s got to be a way for both kinds of people to be
happy, both the people who want everything and the people who just want one
thing. For a long time everyone thought the answer to that was, ‘Let ‘em all have
their own worlds, it’ll sort itself out!’ Then we found out it wasn’t that
simple. You can’t just hole up on your own without either having your neighbors
get suspicious about you, or your own people feeling like they’re in prison.
You can’t just let people come and go without accepting that they’re no longer
going to live in your image—
and
that they’re going to bring in things
you never thought would be part of the picture. Everybody’s going to look at
some part of this picture and feel like they’re being left out.
Every
body.
Me included.”

“I take it you have no prescription for this
ailment either,” Angharad said.

“If I did, I’d be prescribing. I sure wouldn’t be doing
anything as dinky as designing starships.”

—
Henré,
Kallhander CLed, his tone grave
enough in that one word to tighten a fist around my stomach.

Damn it, I thought, and just when I was on the
verge of letting myself forget about everything else that was going on. —
Talk
to me.

—
IPS HQ attempted to obtain Arsèni’s backups.
Apparently he has none. They were all automatically deleted shortly before he
was arrested.

I looked at the plates in front of me and decided another
drink sounded like a fine idea.

—
No backups?
I CLed.
That rather limits
our options, doesn’t it?

—
Barring the use of drugs or CL-based NKF, yes.
And those have already been voted down; the former is deeply unreliable, the
latter takes at least as much time to yield results as a replay, and the
results have typically been of questionable intelligence value. I may be able
to argue for Angharad to visit with him again, but IPS HQ is not particularly
receptive to trying that again right now.

—And I doubt Arsèni is either.
I snagged
whatever drink looked fiercest—something luminescently blue, with a dissolving
red sphere nestled at the bottom of the glass—and tossed back a mouthful. Even
the way that stuff effervesced through the back of my throat and up into my
sinuses didn’t take my mind off our new biggest problem.

—So what
does
IPS HQ want to do?
I
went on.

—
They’re attempting to backtrace the deletion
to see if he has other backups stored, perhaps through a blind drop, but again
that’s time-consuming. They’re also turning back to the clues being harvested
from his workplace and the engine module. Those ought to be fertile enough
ground for us to take action.

—Given that the IPS seems prepared to cover
lots of bases on their own, I have a suggestion. Whatever it is they do, let’s
go and do the exact opposite. Just so we’re not competing.

—I suspect only I would know you were not being
facetious.

—Holler my way the second you have something.

Mylène was giving me a grave look the second I
disconnected. She had
two
CL projections in play now—one copy of herself
squatting next to me and shaking her head, while the primary image sitting on
the couch kept up the conversational jousting with Ulli and Angharad.

“I just heard about what happened with Arsèni,”
she “said” through her closer copy. “Either he’s got a backup stashed
somewhere, or he’s teetering on the brink of something. I vote for the former.
I haven’t met anyone in his position who wouldn’t have deadman’s fear by now.”

I knew what she meant. Arsèni had most likely
spent his entire life knowing the death of his body would be at most a
temporary inconvenience—at least for as long as he could afford the
age-regressive resurrection luxury tax that existed on most worlds that would
have him as a resident. If he’d blown away his backups as a screw-you to the
IPS, that was at best a stall for time before they found where he
really
had
the originals squirreled away and replayed those. His behavior wasn’t the
terror of someone knowing he no longer had a safety net; it was that of a
hunted man.

“To be honest,” she went on, “I thought having
Angharad talk to him was a stupid idea. Brave, but people only care about brave
when it
works.
”

“Just so you know, that was entirely her idea,” I said.

“I imagined it was. And frankly, I think we’re
better off having that guy replayed if they can. I need something else I can
work with. A backflow fluctuation isn’t enough of a hint. So far the team
they’ve sent down there hasn’t spotted anything out of line.”

“I can’t sit here and let this happen,” I said. “I
should be
doing
something.”

“Such as?” Her tone said:
You
should be
doing something?

I’ve already tipped my hand, I thought. I might as
well tip it the rest of the way. Out loud I said: “Yanking on a Protex suit.
Clambering down into the ductwork with the rest of them. Looking for something
only I knew how to look for. Or pulling up a chair in Arsèni’s cell and—”

“And what? Bashing his head against the table to
see what comes out? You know, I wasn’t going to say this back when, because we
weren’t in much contact when the
Kyritan
happened—” What a way to phrase
that, I thought; when the
Kyritan “
happened”. “—but I’m going to say it
now. If there’s one thing about you that’s never changed, it’s this. That you
always think, no matter what’s going on, there’s always something only
you
can do about it. And the problem is, a lot of the time, you’re going to be
right. There
is
going to be something only you can do. But it’s not the
thing you think it is. It’s always something else. And a lot of the time it’s
something a whole lot smaller. Just talking to everyone like you did a moment
ago, that’s doing something. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.”

I looked at the other Mylène, pantomiming accepting
a dish from Ulli, when the table in front of us was capable of feeding everyone
present with no intervention. Would they all be going through such a charade if
Angharad wasn’t present, if the house wasn’t such a hive of Old Way and Low
Highend folks? Angharad had been given a small bowl of what looked like
vegetable congee and she was raising the included dipper to her mouth as Mylène
continued.

“You want to hear a sad story?” she said, again to
my ears only. “Don’t repeat this, though.”

I was about to ask
to whom?,
but she soon
made that part clear.

“When I heard about what happened to the
Kyritan
,
I was neck-deep in something that was demanding a lot of my attention at the
time. I said to myself, ‘I should be more upset about this than I am,’ but I
really
was
that busy, so much so that everything else seemed to have a
curtain thrown over it. I told myself that was all right, because after all I
had
work
to do. By the time I pried myself free, you’d already beat your
retreat from the public eye, and I decided that was for a good reason, so I
didn’t go looking for you. But a couple of years ago, I was talking with Marius
about the whole thing, and he said, ‘Oh, Henré Sim? I was wondering why he
didn’t take that money sooner. He’s kind of an idiot, isn’t he?’
 
”

It took a lot on my part to not laugh out loud in
front of everyone else.

“I’m not offended,” I said. “At this point, I’ve
been called every name there is, and a few others invented just for me.”

“I didn’t agree with him, mind you. I told him
that you can’t always figure out what your actual principles are made of until
they’re put under a hammer. I knew by then, and I know twice as much now, that
life’s not cut-and-dried. You can’t just stake out a comfortable little
position and call that your rock and your guide. Sometimes you have to shift.
And Marius . . . I love him to cosm above, but he’s still young, and
it shows.”

“You think he’d benefit from having someone else
explain it to him? Although, from what you just said, it sounds like I wouldn’t
be the man to do it—”

“Oh, no no no, Henré. I’m not asking you to give
him a heart-to-heart. He’ll grow into it one way or another. I’m just feeling a
lot of pressure from a lot of different directions right now, and whenever that
happens, I worry about him. And when I worry about him, I have to find someone
to get it off my chest to. Say, is he still with—? Yes, he is. Cosm alive, they
sure are hitting it off.”

I patched into the pool-area sensors again.
Sometime in the past few minutes Enid had changed into a single-piece swimsuit
(probably instantiated from a fab somewhere else in the house) and was standing
on the surface of the water, demonstrating a series of bends and leaps to Marius
and a crowd of other onlookers around the pool. I knew full well a strip of film
just under the surface of the water was what kept her afloat and could be used
to turn the whole surface of the pool into a damp trampoline, but that didn’t
make it any less fun to watch. Marius was still in his party outfit, trousers
now rolled to the knees as he continued to dangle his feet in the part of the
pool that wasn’t filmed over. For the first time since I’d arrived at the
party, I even spied myself an IPS officer who wasn’t Ioné; he was cloaked in
CL, but visible by naked eyes, standing at the far end of the pool. I couldn’t
just watch from a distance anymore; I had to send a CL copy of myself out
there.

“Look who decided to join us!” Enid flicked a foot
at me and sent a spray of “water” at me—a feeble little flick of the real
thing, but overlaid in CL-space with a much larger swath of virtual spray. That
way she could aim at and hit my CL projection without hitting anyone else in
the flesh. Drops bounced off the rim of my hat and slid down the front of my
jacket, thanks to me having turned off some of the physics engines for my
projection.

“I was just showing Marius and the rest of our
friends here—” She gestured around. “—a few things about how to get and keep an
audience’s attention. We were just about to move to the rule of, ‘Don’t do any
one thing for too long.’
 
”

“I thought that sounded self-evident,” Marius
said.

“Well, there’s lots of reasons for that,” Enid
said. She rescued three juggling bags from the water at her feet—she’d probably
also instantiated those along with her swimsuit—flipped them up into the air
with one foot, and started a cascade juggle with her hands. “For one, if
someone’s attention wanders right when you change up and go into the next thing,
they miss out. Then they either blame
you
for it, which is bad enough,
or they blame
themselves
for it.”

A fourth bag materialized out of nowhere, which
she then flung in my direction the minute it landed in her hand. I reached out
to grab it and watched as it sailed right through my wrist. No, the bag was
real enough, a real one swapped in at the last second for a projection she’d
conjured up. It was me that was fake.

Behind me, Farhouad fumbled and clutched the damp
bag to his chest with one hand, almost losing his drink in the process. Enid
applauded him and several others, me included, followed suit.

“So what’s the shame if they blame themselves?”
Farhouad asked, tossing the bag back into play. It arced to one side, and
Marius leaned in to snatch it out of the air without standing up.

“Because that’s not what you want to give an
audience!” Enid said. She and Marius began tossing the bags back and forth between
themselves, and after a moment I realized they were doing a cascade-crossover
juggle. “If all you give them is a reason to feel bad about themselves, you
haven’t really done your job, have you? If anything, you’ve betrayed them.”

Forget about watching this through CL eyes; it was
high time to get wet in the flesh. Angharad and Ulli were preoccupied with what
was on their plates anyway, so I posted a CL copy of myself with them and
headed outside for real. When was the last time I’d been at a party that demanded
this much from me?

I was on the verge of forgetting I’d been waiting
for bad news.

“How’ve you betrayed them?” Marius said. “It’s up
to
them
if they can’t keep up with you, isn’t it? They’ve bought their
ticket, so to speak. If they can’t be bothered to give you the attention they
ought to, they’ve no right to complain. You make it sound as if you’re
responsible for all of their happiness.”

“I agree.” Farhouad put his drink down on a table
(extruded from an exterior wall of the house) and approached the pool. “In such
a transaction, it’s entirely the responsibility of the audience what they make
of the experience. Because in the end, is the performer not just as much in it
for his own pleasure?
He
has consented to allow
you
to witness
him at work. And
you
have consented to witness
him
. You should be
grateful he allows you this privilege at all!”

“Hey, that sounds mighty familiar!” Cioran called
out from the sliding door to the house. He carried a tray balanced on his head—the
tray was wider than his shoulders—on which rode an assortment of flutes
brimming over with drinks of various lambent hues. He somehow managed to bring
the tray down to waist level without spilling anything, and I saw just then he
had extruded a cravat and tie, had his hands sheathed in gloves, and sported a
towel draped over one shoulder.

“Drink?—My own custom mixture! They have this
fi-i-ine
local red-sorghum vodka; that and a little ‘jawbreaker syrup’ and you’ve
got yourself something that lights up
everything
it touches. Drink? It’s
all on me!” He went on interleaving his sales pitch as he talked: “See, I’m
inclined to agree with both of them. I agree with her—and you could say I’m
doing that because we have a working creative partnership, and you’d be right! (Drink?)
Always good to share the views of those you’re in league with. Just that we
also happen to have different ideas of what constitutes extending one’s self to
the audience. I’m the more blatant type; I say, spell it all out for ‘em. No hidden
messages, nothing to decipher! (Drink?)” That last request was aimed at me; I snared
his offered drink, which sported the heavy, near-black red of a cornelian
cherry. “All of it upfront and on the surface. Enid, though—she prefers an
expression wrapped within another expression. More work on everyone’s part.
Especially hers, since she’s the one who has to wrap up such a potentially
fragile gift and make sure it’s delivered into all your hands without
splintering!

“
But!
—(Drink?)—I also agree with the ambassador
here. In the end, once all the messages or non-messages have been delivered,
once the package has been sealed with its bow . . . everyone is on
their own again. And no matter what strata you hail from, isn’t that as it
should be? There’s no contradiction of intention here, only interpretation of
that intention. And even under
that,
is there really any contradiction
at all?—Oh, dear, looks like I’ve run dry.”

Cioran had stopped in front of Marius, his tray
now empty. The delighted looks most everyone radiated when they quaffed his mix
had prodded everyone else into stepping up and trying it. I wanted to
congratulate Cioran for somehow making me like the taste of peppermint, but I
was too preoccupied with huffing out volcano fumes (and enjoying it, to boot).