Flight of the Vajra (7 page)

“The first time you cry that the way I did when I
lost my girls, you feel like you’ve got some disease, like there’s something so
wrong with you that you’re ashamed to be in so much pain . . . and
then you see someone else like that, letting it all out just as shamelessly, and
you realize no, it’s not a sickness. Even when I got doors slammed in my face
it still felt better, because I was
doing
something—for me, for all of
us.”

I liked the way she looked when she was listening.
Beatific
was the word that came to mind, after some scrounging. I took
in some extra breath and headed for the finish.

“So. My former employer got wind of what was going
on, and he dumped a few more metric tons of cash into my bank account and told
me to go stick my head in the sand somewhere and stop making us all look bad.”
I slapped my knees. “And, well, here we are.”

It didn’t hit me until after I’d finished speaking
that the buzz—the sick, free-floating feeling in my head—had long dissipated by
the time I mentioned kitchens and porches. Now there was just the weight of
wasted years.

“You were under no obligation to do any of those
things,” she said. “If anything, you were being obliged to do the exact
opposite.”

“Yeah, and after a while, I did. Do the exact
opposite, that is.”

“But still . . . ” She eased herself off
her cushion and took a few steps to the blank wall opposite the garden view.
There wasn’t anything there—not a picture, not even an especially interesting
design—but she turned herself partway towards that wall as she spoke. “We talk
all the time of what is moral or right, but you had the courage to put your
feelings of what is right into action, even at great personal risk. And I
imagine, from what you have said, that you do not consider what you did an act
of ‘courage’. It
needed
to be done, from your point of view.”

She turned her face towards me. She was expecting
an answer, and I wasn’t sure I had one that would have satisfied her.

“You got that right,” I said.” It was my turn to
sound humbled. She, on the other hand, now sounded a little more breathless and
pleading.

“Henré—all of us, in some way, have power over
others. I tell few people that when I was first coronated for this position many
years ago I could have cared less about it. It was simply something that was
destined to happen to me whether or not I had any say in the matter.” She knelt
down next to me, and I felt myself flinch a little. “We who hold the title of
Supreme Kathaya are chosen for it because we show at an early age the signs of
being ascendant to the qualities that demand it. If others in the Achitraka,
including my predecessor, had not seen then what I could be capable of they
would not have chosen me. But all the same being chosen sped my growth into the
role.

“You were a talented designer, and you were
surrounded with people who were willing to help make those designs reality.
Your community of peers, your family, your creations themselves . . .
You were prepared to surrender all of that for something you felt was more
right than all of it put together. I have not seen this in even five other men
in my lifetime. But I ask you this: would you be willing, somehow, to take back
up all that you surrendered? Is the only reason you cannot continue your former
work because you believe you are still at fault for what happened, even if you
do not quite know how? Do you feel you have no right to create anymore?”

I didn’t just want to throw an answer back at her.
I deserved to take it as seriously as she did.

“ . . . I can’t come up with an answer
to that while just sitting here. I—” I shook my head.

It’s always a shame when you find yourself in
front of someone who deserves the truth, but you can’t give it to them. I hadn’t
told anyone the truth about why I’d hid myself away—why would I start even with
her?

“Please. No answer now is required from you. All
that I ask is that you take these words with you when you go.” She put her hand
out—palm down, fingers curved up and spread out—in the gesture that every
follower of the Old Way, me included, knew:
Go in peace.

I returned the gesture with my opposing hand.

“I haven’t done that in forever,” I said, trying
to stand. My knees weren’t working properly, and it had little to do with being
in one sitting position for too long. But once I was on my feet I was better able
to look her in the eye and say the things I’d been holding back the whole time.

“You know,” I said, “after the incident, I had to
go through all my wife’s stuff. She had an ikon of you, same as my little girl.
I took them, and I took the one I had in my room too, and—”

“You got rid of them.”

I was smiling when she said that—bashful,
chagrined, a hand-in-the-cookie-jar smile.

“Barely a day goes by,” she said, “without me
receiving a letter, or a visit, or some other missive from someone who feels
they have lost faith. They direct it at me, but it is always and forever
themselves they have lost faith in. Their faith never came from me to begin
with, but I have found sometimes I can help them find it again. If they wish
it, that is.”

“I’m just—well, I’m glad you didn’t take that too
personally.”

She put her fingertips over her mouth and laughed.
“A picture of me is not
me
, Henré. You still agreed to see me. That much
shows respect. And besides, if you turn away from me only to find something
greater, how am I to find that a loss?”

She reached for the door, but before she slid it
back she added:

“You were a man of great strength once. Nothing is
stopping you from becoming one again. I urge you not to shirk your chances to
reclaim yourself and do what you feel is right.”

I
am
doing what I feel is right, I thought.
And yet as I stepped back out into the corridor—she followed along behind me—I
couldn’t shake the feeling she’d been working her way up to asking me something
else, and had stopped just short of doing so.

“Listen, uh . . . ” I turned back to her
and saw she was listening with the same open, receptive eyes as she had been
back in the room. “I have a favor. I know we had an hour booked—”

“Yes, we still have time. Did you want to speak of
something else?”

“It’s . . . actually more complicated
than that. There’s a girl who came with me—she’s waiting outside—and when she
found out I’d been invited here she begged me to come along and ask for five
minutes of your time. I’m willing to give up some of my time; I just didn’t
know if
you
were willing to trade like that.”

“A girl? How old?”

“Fourteen, fifteen. She was with the troupe that
was in town the day before you showed up.”

“The Sky Theater! Yes, I’ve heard of them.” She
drew herself up a little straighter—I wondered how that was possible, since she
always stood ramrod-firm and with her chin up—and nodded. “Since you have
vouched for her, I would prefer you remain present during her audience.”

“Sure, of course.” What was I going to do: say no?
Well, in theory, there was nothing stopping me from doing that—but now I knew
firsthand it was nigh-impossible to stand in the same room with her and not
feel obliged to do what she said, lapsed Old Way or not.

They brought me back out to the front door, where
I saw Enid being held at the main gate. No mistaking her at any distance. She
was bounding up and down over the heads of the guards and waving at me; I half
expected her to climb right over them.

“Fifteen minutes tops,” I told her. She had a
giddy bounce in her step, but as we were walked back into the conference room her
bounciness leveled off.

The second the door slid shut, Enid bounded—no,
lunged
—right
at Angharad like a dog pouncing for the throat.

The girl had her right arm drawn back and her
right fist balled up good and tight, and the fact that she was
throwing a
punch
at the other woman was still being processed by my brain long after
my own body had leapt into action.

I couldn’t turn on all the protomic goodies I had
on my person, which for the time being were safely disguised as the clothes I
was wearing. Definitely not here, where whatever else happened I was likely to
come under enough scrutiny to blow every cover I had. But I could at least
throw myself forward, cock one arm around her punching arm, and give one good
hard yank that flipped her around and brought her to the mats.

She didn’t just lie there. She tried to kick
everything she could reach with her feet, bite anything within range of her
mouth. I got her face against the floor and knelt in just the right place to
warn her that I meant plenty of business.

“You sit down and
calm
down,” I said, “or I
swear to whatever you wanna put on a pedestal that I will break your cute little
neck.”

Brown belt be damned, I thought.

Slowly, Angharad eased herself onto her cushion.
Her eyes were wide and frightened instead of wide and elated, but the rest of
her face held the same serenity it had before Enid had lunged at her. By the
time she was fully seated, even her eyes were calm again. Nice trick, I
thought; me, I’m still shaking on the inside and sweating on the outside. I
heard footfalls outside, loud and heavy.

“Go easy,” I told Enid, relaxing my grip, “and don’t
you dare do anything else funny, or we’ll
both
get eaten alive.”

She had pulled herself halfway into a sitting
position by the time the doors were flung back. Two guards—not Angharad’s
retinue, but planetary security forces—stood in the doorway. Their olive-green
body armor and their yellow-visor helmets didn’t belong in this serene house
with all its gardens and light, but here they were.

“It’s quite all right,” Angharad told them,
flapping a hand dismissively. “The girl stumbled on one of the mats and had a
tumble. Nothing more.”

“Is that what happened?” The guard looked at the
two of us, all no-nonsense. I didn’t doubt I could handle him or his weaponry
if it came to it, but I really, really didn’t want to.

“Yeah, we’re fine. Just worried for her,” I said.

Enid said nothing, just reached out and started to
massage her allegedly stubbed toe. The guards gave us one final look—
you
better not make us regret this
—nodded to Angharad (“Ma’am.”) and stepped
back into the hallway.

“You realize they’ve got every room in this place
under surveillance,” I said out loud to both of them once the retreating steps
were gone. Not that it mattered by then what I said out loud, I thought.

“I said before, this conversation is entirely
private.” Angharad gestured at the ceiling. “One of the conditions I insisted
on before using this venue was that all sensory surfaces for any room I used were
to be disabled for the duration of my stay. The authorities granted that and
several other requests sight unseen. I refuse to hold official audiences in
private under those circumstances.”

Enid was pulling gingerly at her foot. She’d
probably bent something the wrong way when I’d yanked her to the floor. That’s
right; pain’s a great teacher, isn’t it? I thought.

“You want to explain yourself?” I said to her.
“I’d think that anyone with the brio to take a swing at the Kathaya using
nothing but her own bare fists has a really damn good reason for it.”

Enid gathered herself up, stood, then re-seated
herself—very formally, legs tucked under—on the guest’s cushion. Spine straight
up and down, hands flat on her thighs . . . seeing her comport
herself like that only made me a little more riled. You’re only
now
getting
all formal because you don’t have the luxury of punching her anymore? I
thought. But I shelved my anger, much as she must have done, and let her take
the floor.

“I lost my father,” Enid said, “three years ago.”

Angharad nodded in recognition. “I am sorry to
hear . . . ”

“I lost him because of
you
.”

I think Angharad and I both recoiled at that one.

“We both lost Mom when I was only three. We were
living in this apartment off the campus where Dad was teaching. She had gone to
the beach to surf, and something happened while she was in the water. A heart
problem. ‘Aortic dissection’, they called it. Nothing you can diagnose ahead of
time. It just
happens.
She fainted, was dragged under and drowned. Her CL
bio-alarm went off, but by the time the lifeguards got to her, it was too late
ten times over. And since my Mom and Dad were Old Way—like the whole rest of
that planet—they didn’t believe in backups. Dead is dead.”

I’d inched over to look at her from the side, and
I could see the sardonic little smile she put on when she said that.

“’So it’s only Dad and me now, and he wants to do
anything to make me happy. Dance lessons, karate. I’m throwing myself into all
of it, too. I get real good at it. Everyone tells me that. But he looks at me
sometimes and I can see him worrying, because he knows backups only work if you
start doing them right when someone’s born. You can’t start now; it’s years too
late. He could lose me one day the same way he lost Mom, and there’s nothing he
can do about it.

“And then there are days when he looks at me and
he doesn’t see
me
anymore. He looks at everything and all he sees is
Mom. It doesn’t help if he recites the Cycle of Grace a hundred times a day. He
just wants her back. I sat down with him one time, and I said, ‘Dad, it’s not
like I don’t want her back too.’ But I had other things now, and all he told
himself he had was
her
.”

She yanked at her nose and sniffed hard. She
wasn’t crying, but I’d seen that gesture before as the kind of thing you did to
ward off incoming tears.

“So one day Dad goes to a camp meeting for the
Glory of the Way. You know them, right?”

“I know them,” Angharad replied. “You must also know
I do not sanction them or their actions.”

I knew them, too, and to know them was to wrinkle
one’s nose at them. If the Old Way was the religion, the Glory of the Way was
the cult. They roamed in packs of twenty to fifty, bumming around from one
planet to another in frank imitation of Angharad’s own pilgrimages. Whenever
she appeared planetside somewhere, they showed up and made a royal nuisance of
themselves. She had on more than one occasion begged them—sometimes gently,
sometimes not so gently—to stop doing that. They never took the advice.

“He dragged me along to that damned thing,” Enid went
on. “I‘ve been in a circus myself, so I won’t call what this was a circus. A
zoo
is more like it. They spent all their time doing three things: figuring out
where you were gonna show up next, figuring out how to scam free room and board
from whatever planet they were on at the time, and reciting all the different
Cycles in their own messed-up, rewritten versions. I was there for a day and a
half, and I ran off before they jumped the planet.
I
ran off; Dad
didn’t. He stayed. He left with them the morning after I ran off.

“I ended up on the doorstep of a friend of my dad,
a guy named Anjeoh. Cried out the whole thing to him. He took me in, him and
his partner, and that first night while I was lying in their guestroom looking
at the ceiling, I thought two things. One was, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to go back
to dance practice like nothing happened.’ The other was, ‘I’m going to get
emancipated so I don’t have to depend on any more stupid crazy people.’ And I
did both of those things. I went and did my plies and my practice, and then I
started getting my act together so I could take the emancipation test. I
couldn’t take it until I was at least thirteen, but I had to start somewhere.

“Anjeoh went and told the police about Dad. They
put out a warrant, but they warned me, ‘If he’s gone runabout he might not turn
up for a long time, if ever.’ They told me all kinds of stories about how Glory
Groups have these sneaky different ways of avoiding the authorities. Well, I
wasn’t going to wait for him. I was just going to get on with my own life.
That’s what I told myself.”

Another sniff from her.

“How old were you when all this happened?”
Angharad asked.

“I was ten.”

“Did they find your father?”

“Sure. Five months later. He was in the same Glory
Group he’d bailed on me with. They were trying to smuggle themselves planetside
in cargo containers, which is pretty typical for them. They got caught when the
latrine system they’d built into the container broke and leaked out into the
hold of the ship they were in.” Her smile was crooked and mirthless. “Now he’s
on some farmstead colony, working to pay off the fines. Last I heard he’ll get
everything paid off sometime next year or so, but all he wants to do is join
right back up with another Glory Group. I guess I just don’t measure up to
that.
”
Her smile bent itself a little more.

“Let me ask something,” Angharad said, putting
space between her words to better contrast Enid’s onrushing talk. “What is it
that you believe I can do about this?”

“Because
you’re
the only one he’ll listen
to!” Enid seethed on. “You go to him and you say, ‘Look, do you realize what a
mistake you’ve made? You’ve got a daughter out there who just wants you back.
Why can’t you just take that instead of chasing something that isn’t real?’ And
it has to be
you
saying that. He won’t listen to anyone else, because
that’s the—the
thing
he’s all bound up in now, that’s how it all works!
It’s all stemming from
you
, and you can’t just wave your hands and say,
‘Look, I tell them to cut it out, but they’re not
really
my problem.’ Don’t
you tell
me
they’re not your problem!” Her tears had come at last; I
wrapped my fingers around my knees and forced myself not to look away. “You
talk all the time about how much you care and how you want to make things
better for the people who follow you? Well, what about this? If you
really
cared about this, you’d g—you’d go and tell him to c-cut it out!” Her last few
words were half-submerged under her blubbering.

It was the same thing I’d said to myself in the
wake of all the dead from the disaster:
If you
really
cared about
this, you’d—
what? Do something other than sit on my ass and pretend this
wasn’t my doing, that’s what.

How many times had Angharad said to others, in
interviews and quotes:
I have nothing that you don’t have yourself
? Now
I saw it was true. She was just like me, if only in one way: she only had so
many ways to say she was sorry before she had to go and
do
something
about it.

It would have been easy for me to say something
like,
Kids will be kids . . .
Just brush it all off as the
whining of someone who still hadn’t done enough of certain kinds of growing up.

But I knew, from a place inside me that I didn’t
have the kind of words to talk about with others, that this
kid
was
hitting a nerve. Both with me and with Her Grace.

Angharad rose from her seat and sat down again,
knee-to-knee with Enid. Enid, her arms shaking, had covered her face with her
hands; she almost jumped when the older woman put her own hands on her
shoulders. That made me, all of a meter away, flinch too. A full jump from Enid
would have dented the ceiling.

“I can’t promise you that anything will happen,”
Angharad said, “but I can promise you that I will try. I will go to your father
and speak to him as you have said. But everything that happens from then on is
entirely his. Will you accept that?”

“Yeah.” The word came out as a dismal sob.

“Let me ask a favor of you as well. If you can,
please come tomorrow to the open house that I’ll be holding. I can guarantee
entry for the two of you, although there are limited seats.” She smoothed back
Enid’s hair from both sides of her face. “There are people who come to these
meetings and who ask me many of the same questions that you do. ‘Why do these
things happen?’ ‘Why won’t you take responsibility?’ I have answers for all
those things—and while they may not be the answers you want to hear, they are
the only answers that I can give. Will you come? We can arrange the rest of the
details there.”

Another “yeah”, this one not quite as dismal as
before.

I let go of my knees and stood up. My feet had
fallen asleep.

“I will arrange to have a cab meet you at the back
gate,” Angharad said, in a slightly more conversational tone.

“Thanks.” I reached down and gave Enid a hand up.
From the way her ankles wobbled—something I’d not seen them do before—she
needed it.

Enid didn’t say a word until we were sinking back
into the cushions of the cab’s back seat. The cabs here were all ground-only
units; they had ordinances against non-police flight to keep the sky clear, the
usual Old Way resort-planet stuff. The kind of pretentious atavism some people
cherished, I reminded myself, me included—but after Enid’s outburst and
confession it wasn’t hard to remember why some people cherished it so lovingly.

The same Old Way that had given her a real mother
and father had taken them from her as well. One taken from her by dint of Enid
being the product of a world where serial cognitive restoration was not
permitted, meaning (as Enid had so aptly put it) dead is dead. The other,
though, had been taken from her in a far more complicated way.

I broke the ice as soon as we left the main gate. “I’m
sorry about your mother and father.”

“It’s all so
stupid.
” Her face was
resolutely turned to face out the window.

“What is?”

“The Old Way. All it does it give people reasons
not to do things. You can’t make backups of yourself like they do on the
Highend worlds, because that’s just, you know,
wrong
. You can’t do this
and you can’t do that. It’s all about what you
can’t
do, and I’m sick of
life just being one big ‘no’ to everything.” She thumped the window with her
fist—gently, over and over, a bored kid’s game.

“You think Angharad’s stupid too? But you seem
pretty convinced your dad will listen to her.”

She turned from the window, finally. “I’ve seen it
happen before! The way other people respond to her,
just
her. —And, no,
I don’t think she’s
stupid
, exactly. I just hate the fact that she’s got
that kind of power over other people. That all she has to do is
say
something and it’s
reality
to them.”

“Why don’t you try turning that around?”

“Huh?”

“Why don’t you instead hate the fact,” and with
this I hunkered down a bit in the seat to put myself more at her eye level, “that
other people
let
someone have that kind of power over them?”