Flight of the Vajra (89 page)

“You tell them all this over and over, and yet
they come back to you anyway, begging all the same.” Aram started to heave
himself over so he would be resting on his chest. “Now I understand why they
need someone new for the job every few decades! —And the only reason you don’t
have that power is because you
shirk
it, from the sound of it. Why don’t
you try taking it up for a change, see what happens?”

“I
have
seen what happens,” Enid said. “It
never works. It always looks like a good idea, at first. And then you find out
what people
do
when they get into a position like that.”

“Even people like her?”

“It’s people who
use
people like her as
their excuse. You can do anything you want in the name of someone else, or
something else. And that’s just the problem.”

Aram grunted as he lowered himself back down,
cheek against the cushions. “So if you were to ‘point the ways’ for me, O
Kathaya, what would you recommend?”

“That would take more than one minute to know, let
alone say,” Angharad said. “But if you are serious about learning such a thing,
I could make it possible for you.”

“In what sense?”

“Political asylum.”

Aram rolled onto one side to stare at her. “With
you
?
The Achitraka? The IPS won’t be able to stop laughing! Well, they will, long
enough to throw all of us in a cell. They like me right where I am, talking to
you.”

“I am not being facetious.” I could have sworn I
heard a coquettish tone in her voice, something I’d never heard before. “I can
offer asylum to you, and it will be respected. It will give you—both you as you
lie here, and all of the other ‘you’s that would be derived from your
template—all of you will be given protection from prosecution.”

“Why would I need that? I’ve never been less than
two steps ahead of the prosecutors.”

“That was true, once. Now, they have learned how
you propagate yourself. They have learned how to look for the repositories
where you conceal your aggregate memories. Those instances can be found and
erased automatically. You might not die all at once, but you could no longer
assume you will have successors. You, here as you are now, might well be all
that is left.”

“I’ll take my chances, thanks.”

“There is something else that asylum would provide
you with, something you have expressed an interest in having in this very
conversation.”

“Which is?”

“Company. And not simply any company, not simply
the company of those you are using to propagate yourself, and whom you cannot
help but find reason to feel contempt for. It would be the company of others
who are prepared to receive you as a peer, and not simply as a refugee or a
specimen. Or, worst of all, a product to be used.”

—
You’re going to have a hard time convincing
me
to think of him as a peer, Angharad.
I couldn’t keep my attention on my
work any longer, especially since it was mostly make-work designed to turn my
head away from them. And again, I heard that tone in her words, the sound of
someone deliberately invoking temptation—something I couldn’t help but think
would be wasted on the likes of Aram.

Aram rolled back onto his stomach and stared at
the blur of CL-space in front of him somewhere—maybe he saw there the wall of
his real-world holding cell. “You’re misinterpreting me,” he said. “I’m not
that
hard-up for a little companionship. I knew full well when I started this
journey what sort of taste it would leave in my mouth.”

“Has it been worth it, then?”

“Why are you so worried about me, anyway? Worry about
yourselves, for a change. Worry about
you
.”

“It’s kind of her
job
to worry about
others!” Enid said. “And yeah, even worrying about . . . people like
you.”

I would have had a hard time using the word
people
there myself, too, I thought.

“Please tell me,” Angharad said again. “From where
you sit now. Has it been worth it?” No more sweet tones from her now. Every
syllable was galvanized, sporting wicked edges.

Aram’s only answer was a wan smile and the jolt of
the connection being dropped.

“Well,” Kallhander said, as the inside of the
shuttle restored itself around all of us, “that was at least a worthy attempt.”

“He has not said no,” Angharad said. “That amounts
to him stalling for time. Even from someone like him, it is not hard to sense ambivalence.”

“Unfortunately, it’s going to be up to him from
now on. Commissioner Ralpartha has insisted he be placed on observational
lockdown until further notice. If he wants asylum, he’ll have to ask for it on
his own—”

“Good,” I said. “Saves us the trouble of making
idiots of ourselves.” I let them all look at me for a moment, then went on.
“Look, Angharad. That
thing
you are placating killed my family, and
quite a few other people besides.”

“That hasn’t been put out of mind—”

I cut Kallhander off. “No, it’s just
old news
,
right? And you were hoping it would be just old news to me, too? I was holding
out hope it was, you know. I wanted to think I could sit down with it—” Yes,
it
again; this time, it was deliberate. “—and just see a . . . a
specimen, a piece of evidence. But that’s not what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing
something that’s going to get away with everything and thumb its nose at us and
laugh.”

“You want it destroyed,” Angharad said. No malice
but no real sympathy, either. Just a statement of fact.

“I’ve gone back and forth about it. For all your
sakes, I went back and forth about it. But I’m sorry, no, I’m not the rational
paragon I ought to be. I want it dead. I want it to have no more chances.”

“Even if its continued existence means that many
more opportunities to bring Marius to justice?” Kallhander said.

“Marius? He’s your problem now, not mine. Isn’t
that how you wanted it in the first place? No more meddling? Well, now you’ve
got it, mister.”

“Not I,” Kallhander said, but I wasn’t listening to
him, or anyone else, anymore. I turned back around and buried myself in the
instantiation algorithms. At least they didn’t talk back.

Nobody said anything to me
until we’d
parked at the dock, which was already hard at work fabbing the core modules for
the new
Vajra
. Estimated time to completing instantiation: another hour,
local time (1h 14m solar). The waiting rooms at the dock were all blank little
spaces that you were free to deck out with whatever CL paint-and-wallpaper job you
felt like. I parked myself in a corner and pretended to be busy.

Enid came over and made a quiet little physical
nuisance of herself until I relented and patched her in. “Nuisance” is the
wrong word, really; all she did was put a hand on my shoulder and
pretend-massage it.

“I’ve seen you upset before,” she said. “I’ve seen
you gloomy, I’ve seen you sarcastic and wound up and . . . a lot of
other things. But I’ve never, ever seen you
mad
. Not like this.”

“This is a special case,” I said. “It usually is for
instances of mass murder.”

“How’re you even supposed to get him to take
responsibility for this? It wasn’t
him
that did it.”

“Is it? He knows all about it. He
bragged
about doing it. He doesn’t refuse the responsibility; he welcomes it! Yes, it
wasn’t
that particular instance
of him that did it, but this is as close
as we’re going to get in this lifetime to someone ‘fessing up, and you know
it.” I’ve said this before, I thought, and I’m getting sick of repeating
myself. I felt like the man who has to tell the people around him five times in
a row that he’s on fire.

“Because someone’s gotta pay, right?”

“Yes! Someone always has to . . . pay.”
She had put both hands on my shoulders and turned me around to face her, and
right then as I looked into her face and spoke the last couple of words, I felt
my voice dwindle.

“I said that too, remember?” she said. “I went to
Angharad, and I said the same thing, more or less. Someone’s gotta pay. And I
got her to pay, sort of, by helping me. But you’re the one who made me
understand it wasn’t her
fault
.”

“Not the same,” I said. “
Not
the same.”

“No. I
know
it’s not the same, but look at
it anyway! Look, I hate Aram, too. I think he’s a monster.”

“Just not as much of a monster as Marius, right?
Why is that? Because Aram didn’t try to get
his
hands up y—”

I’ve been punched in the face a few times in my
life—Nishi, by accident—but not one of them stung as much as Enid slapping me.
It wasn’t even a very hard slap; it was the kind of spank you give a child, one
where you’re not even sure you have the nerve to do it anyway. One slap, on the
left cheek, and a second later I felt the eye above that cheek oozing tears.

“Enid. Henré.”

Angharad stood over both of us. The real sign
she’s disturbed, I thought, is when you don’t see anything on her face at all,
like right now.

“It’s all right,” Enid said back over her shoulder
to Angharad and the other four, who had all been creeping that much closer
after hearing the slap.

Admit it, I thought. The girl’s done more growing
up during this whole escapade than you have.

“I just—” I found myself looking back and forth
between the two of them as I spoke. “—I just don’t want him
rewarded
for
doing the wrong thing. Is that so bad?”

“No, of course not,” Angharad said.

“And I’m sorry I hit you.” Enid looked about as
abashed as I did. “But that was
low
, Henré. It might have been true, but
that doesn’t make it any less low. Yeah—I don’t hate him as much because, no,
he didn’t kiss me one minute and then stick a collar ‘round my neck the next.
He was just the, the what-do-you-call-it, the guard dog. I can’t hate him the
same way. Just don’t be disappointed in me because of that, all right?”

“There’s a lot of things I feel about you,” I
said, “and disappointed is most definitely not one of them.”

She put her head on my shoulder and dangled her
arms down my back. I decided to let her get away with it as long as she damn
well pleased.

“Henré?” Ulli called out to me, interrupting our
hug. “It’s finished. Take a look!”

“At least,” Cioran said, peering through the
viewport, “it looks like what ‘finished’ ought to be for something of
that
size.”

I saw for myself and nearly swooned.

Simulations and scale-model copies of anything are
just that: cheap little imitations. The real thing, even if it’s just a single
instance of a template someone else can use, always has a grandeur to it. The
new
Vajra
consisted of the old one, scaled up somewhat and bound up in a
tubular mesh that held some twenty modules, each of which would fill about two
standard elevator-rack spaces. The bill for the dock rental alone, to say
nothing of the substrate, was going to hurt, but I wasn’t thinking about the freshly-gouged
hole in my bank account. I was thinking about how this would be a space soon to
be filled with human lives, and how you couldn’t expect the presence of
something like that to have a pricetag.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” I said. It was supposed to
have been a
May-I-present-to-you
voice, but it sounded a lot more
hushed. “Let’s move in. And—mind your heads in the corridor.”

I brought up the rear this time, as we all marched
through the connection gate and into the core module. I wanted to see the new
spring in everyone else’s step, but it looked like everyone was still a little
too preoccupied with the drama they’d just seen.

I’d barely crossed the threshold of my own ship
before Kallhander CLed me.
—Our Aram access has been restricted.
Temporarily, but . . .

—Go on and say it. I think we’re all past
having to tapdance around each other.

—They want a report, within the local hour, about
Angharad’s intentions in the short term. After all, the entire purpose of being
assigned to this duty was to develop such a report, but the events of the last
few days were . . .

— . . . distracting. No blame there.

—But now we’ve been officially warned, so not
supplying the report by the deadline means an automatic demotion for us. If
they are satisfied with what they hear, they’ll reinstate access. If not, it’s
a demotion and possibly other disciplinary actions to follow.

—Kallhander, you know full well Angharad is not
going to make you take that kind of fall just to keep your mouths shut about
something that’s going to be public knowledge anyway. And you’re more useful to
everyone involved if you’re not walking around with a blot on your permanent
record. If it’s my consent you were asking for to file such a report, you have
it.

—I also planned on asking for her explicit consent
as well. And I expect her to supply me with exact wording for what to pass
along.

—
Was that your idea or hers?

Ioné: —
Actually, it was mine.

She was on the other side of the cabin, looking up
through a translucent hull section towards the underside of the thick tube-mesh
wrapped around the ship’s core.

Ioné went on. —
Angharad originally proposed we submit
something to the effect that the Kathaya would be taking a sabbatical from her
duties in the form of a multi-world tour. I suggested this sounded too similar
to her prior actions to have much of an impact, and offered a counter-proposal:
that she would be doing it for the sake of providing several others in her
party, not part of her formal body of governance, with an opportunity to
witness up close and even participate in the way she interacted with others and
broadcast the philosophy of the Old Way. Some of them might well even be
considered “lay-acolytes”.