Flight of the Vajra (92 page)

“Oh, cosmos, they’re drawing straws?”

“For non-residents, yes. They’re suspending use of
the elevator, but still managing the use of airspace to avoid problems. If we
all had to queue up for that one elevator, we’d never get off in time.” He’d
done the same math as me, I guess. “I have a ship of my own and I’m taking as
many people as I can, but it isn’t a lot. I’m up in, um, four and a half hours.”

Drawing straws, I thought, but only so a very few
who didn’t even need to leave in a hurry, could. Even
he
doesn’t really
know what’s happening. Yet.

“Henré,” Anjai broke back in after I’d gone
silent, “what are you still doing here?”

“Trying to work a few fresh miracles. You still in
touch with Deepetha Khiam?”

“In touch with her? She’s
here
, actually.
She was going to chair a breakout panel on the last day of the summit, but
. . . well, no summit, and now this. I think she pulled a later
number than mine, last I spoke to her. Why, did you want to ask her something?”

“Yeah, and I’d like you riding shotgun in the
conversation to give it a little more credibility.”

“Henré. Why do you assume you need
me
for
that? You’re
still
one of the most credible people I know.”

“Is it a sin to want to cover all the bases?”

His smile was genuine. “Let’s see if she can
stomach our company, then.”

Deepetha Khiam did in fact want company. She was
in someone’s living room—real or just shared CL-space, it was difficult to
tell, since the dozen or so other people in there were also broadcasting
furiously. The air around her was aswirl with city maps, remote conversations,
and at least one familiar-looking solar output chart with its curve reaching
upwards a good deal further than I’d remembered.

“Mister Sim! And Anjai! Pardon the mess; I imagine
things are just as insane wherever you are.” She (or her CL image, who could
tell) wore her hair in a single thick, looping braid that was spiral-wrapped in
a scarf and chased throughout with jeweled chains. She had the end of the braid
clutched in one hand and was working it around and around with her thumb; I
half-expected her to bring it to her mouth and bite it in dismay. Those giant,
dark eyes of hers were as merry as ever, despite the situation.

“Deepetha, hi!” I called out. “I hate being blunt,
but right now, I have to be.”

“Henré, your blunt is better than most peoples’
polite. So blunt away.”

“What are the odds of you selling me a batch of fifty-five
hundred entanglement engines on credit?” I realized too late I should have said
us
or
the Kathaya,
not just
me.
Of the two of us, odds
were Angharad had the better credit rating by now.

“On
your
credit? That wouldn’t be a
problem. But where are you planning to take delivery?”

“Here.”

“
Here
!? Impossible! All inbound traffic’s
been cancelled.”

“I’m working on having a string or two pulled to
do something about that. I just want to know if it’s possible to take delivery
within the next—” I pulled out a number I thought we could work with. “—eight
to ten hours.”

“Well. Last I checked the drop-ship depot we have
on Skarsgård
should
have enough back-stock to fill an order like that on
short notice. Orders have been down a bit for two solar months in a row now, so
we throttled production accordingly, but I doubt there would have been enough
of a rush while my back was turned to leave you hanging.”

Skarsgård was a piddling three hops away. More
than enough time, I thought, provided we’re not on the hook too long for it to
come planetside after the jump.

I said what came honestly to mind: “You’re an
angel, Deepetha.”

“Hoh! You won’t say that after you see the bill I
send you. —You’re going to get back to me with a delivery address, I take it?”

“Within the next quarter hour, one way or
another.”

“Also. Dare I ask what you plan to do with all
this?”

“Keep an eye on the news,” I grinned at her, and closed
the link.

“You see?” Anjai said. “I didn’t have to say a
word. I had the feeling once she knew what you were up to, she’d say yes.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “how come she didn’t try
to get all this going herself?”

Anjai looked back out his window. “Maybe she’s
just not that kind of person, Henré. You
are
that kind of person, on the
other hand. After all, she’s Highend; they work very hard to make sure
other
people take the real risks.”

“Catch up with you later. Good luck.”

I can’t be the only one pulling together a plan of
this magnitude, I thought. I
can’t
. Not out of all the hundreds of
thousands of other people out there . . . It wasn’t so much about the
weight growing on my shoulders (although I felt it more in the pit of my
stomach than on my shoulders), it was about how alone that realization made me
feel.

Wait. Alone? I asked myself. Look around you. What
do you see?

Angharad and Cioran bluffing their way through one
functionary after another to get the Prince talking to them; Ulli, pawing
through the rest of the documentation for clues about how else the evacuation
might proceed; Enid, letting the eyes and ears of the mob flow into her, and
letting her advice flow back out to them; Kallhander and Ioné collating IPS
ground and air movements and feeding them back to Enid with hints about what
they might be doing next . . . and, under and above all that, the
hundreds and now thousands of people flooding out into the streets.

You’re not alone and you know it, I thought.

Watching them for a moment confirmed something
else for me. Not even all this frenzy could destroyed the feeling I’d been
basking in earlier—that feeling of being entirely at home, yes, even in the
middle of
this.
If anything our responses were only heightening that
feeling, chiseling a new facet into it that I didn’t think could have been
there.

For however long it lasts, I thought, I’m home.

It had taken
the entire time I’d been
closing escrow with Deepetha for Cioran to reach someone in the Prince’s employ
who took him halfway seriously. Evidently whatever message he’d given them had
reached its target, because a minute or so later the space that Angharad and
Cioran shared with their two couches became the southernmost region of a space
I recognized immediately as the Prince’s throne room.

The boy on the couch was busy getting soused. He had
a magnum of something ostensibly alcoholic to his mouth, and at least one other
dead soldier lay between the couch’s legs.

“What a letdown,” the Prince said, recognizing
Cioran only after moments of bleary peering. “See, I told myself, ‘A body like
this—you’ll have no tolerance for alcohol at all! You’ll be drunk on one sip,
rolling around in your girls’ laps.’ And then I remembered this model comes
standard with the dehydrogenase-4 package! But then I thought, ‘If toxicity
comes before actual inebriation with that package’—see, that’s why they
recommend against it, because you don’t know you’re dying until it’s too late,
or so they say—‘if toxicity comes before actual inebriation, then maybe now we
can
find out what the hangover that kills you feel like!’ And so here we are.”

Guess he took his backup and had it shipped out
already, I thought. Same with his liquid assets. All he had to do now was wait
to die so he could be reincarnated elsewhere. So why not go out in a manner of
your choosing?

“Not too late to talk shop, I hope?” Cioran said.
“You don’t seem all that preoccupied, to be blunt about it.”

“Is this about that concert business? I said yes
. . . Why don’t we work out the details when you’re not running for
your life from a solar prominence? Heh.”

“That was partly what I wanted to work out the
details about, actually.” Cioran sounded unusually flat-footed to my ears. “From
everything I’m seeing, you’re not planning to pack up and leave? Not
physically, that is?”

“No,” the Prince said, as if someone had dared to
impugn his taste in suicide methods. “Not physically. Why?”

“How much would you be prepared to ask for the
house and the protomic reservoir under it?”

“Ask?” It took two more blinks from him for the
rest of us to realize that in his mind the word simply didn’t compute. And he
doesn’t even have the excuse of being truly drunk, I thought.

But that didn’t explain the deeply unhealthy look
he had and the tremor in his hand.

“I want to buy it from you,” Cioran said. “The
house, the reservoir, all of it. And the landing rights, too, although I’m
fairly sure that would come with such a package. How much?”

The Prince squinted at him hard enough to sprain
his eye muscles. “You want to
buy
the property from me? Even though this
whole planet’s set to melt to slag in plus or minus two days?”

“I had,” Cioran said, striding closer, “an idea,
an Idea among ideas. A concert—most of my great ideas involve a concert of some
kind, you know
that
by now—where the entire venue is your house. Not
reproduced from a program, mind you—the
actual house, as it was standing,
‘in
those last few days’. Crated up and transported, an artifact of the last
moments of a world! There’ll be melancholy in it, to be sure, but also hope
. . . rebirth, transcendence, all that fun stuff. And you’d get a box
seat to the whole thing, of course. Might be a while before it’s done, but
. . . ”

The Prince pushed himself mostly upright. “But
where in the cosmos would you
put
it?”

Good question, I thought; why don’t you tell us?
It’d save us the guesswork as to where you’d be fleeing.

“Put it? As in, on a planet? No, no, not
dirt-side, no! A movable feast, that’s what it would be—a circus that parks
itself in a geostationary orbit for a few days, draws in the crowds, then jets
off for points both known and unknown, and in the meantime provides all who
come a veritable wilderness of experiences! And you’d be a priority guest—no,
better yet, you’d be a full-fledged partner! Half the gross.”

“Normally, I don’t do business with endangered
populaces, but . . . you really want it that badly?”

“Absolutely I do.”

“Transportation is your own responsibility, you
realize that?”

“As long as we have line-of-sight rights, it’s
done.”

“It’s like you said—line-of-sight to the sky is
standard in most such contracts.” The Prince wiped his face top-to-bottom with
a hand and looked up at what I presumed was the arched ceiling of his throne
room. “It’ll be subtracted from my prorated share of the recovery fund ... but
that’s a flyspeck out of the mountain. So you take the whole estate as a gift—a
donation, a start-up fund for Cioran’s Movable Feast, however you want to call
it. No. Nancelares’s Movable Feast! Of Bridgehead! Brought To You By Cioran!”

He tried to stand and throw an arm around Cioran’s
shoulder, and while his CL projection was able to do it, it shook in a way that
told me his physical body had pitched itself around and hit the floor. The
projection from his side jerked and jumped, and sure enough a moment later we
saw him lying at the foot of the steps leading to his throne.

“I shouldn’t hurt this much,” he said, pawing at
himself. “I should be drunk and not feeling a thing. Why does it
hurt
this much?”

Status tokens in the far corner of our field of
vision told us he had just taken an incremental backup. At least he’ll remember
this part later on, I thought, even if he tries to back out of it. His
emergency connection had kicked in, which forced any currently open CL
connections to remain open as a resuscitative measure.

Angharad rose and walked into the scope of the
Prince’s sensory reception. She saw what I was seeing, too: the Prince’s
current body was shutting down. Not drunkenness, I thought, as I fed the
symptoms we harvested from him through a doctor program. It was honest-to-cosm
poison.

“I don’t understand!” The Prince balled his fists
and drummed his heels, but with his muscles so toneless the tantrum was more
like a weak shiver of cold. “It wasn’t supposed to
hurt
this much!”

“I am here,” Angharad said, and covered the boy’s
forehead with her hand.

“Oh, go away, you silly witch!” I saw and heard
him say it two ways—the full-throated shout he delivered directly from his CL,
and the feeble mumble that he delivered from his real body, as relayed by the
room’s ambient sensors. “I didn’t ask for you to come and send me off
. . . not like I’m really going anywhere, after all . . . ”
He let out a wicked giggle. “S’pose you’re going to say I was ‘never born’, so
I can’t die an’way, is that right?”

“No,” she said. “What you are now will never exist
again in this universe.”

Cioran, looking like he didn’t really understand
what he himself was doing, knelt next to the Prince and took one of his hands.

“Get ‘way, both ‘f you.” The Prince tried to pull
his hand away, but all he could manage was another shudder. “I won’t—be seen
like this, d’you hear? I was . . . I thought it would be easy, quiet,
I had the doses figured for body weight and ‘tabolism . . . but I
forgot about the toxicity package . . . It was supposed to just let
me nod off . . . but too much at once and now this . . . No!
Don’t send anyone in . . . I dismissed them all earlier
. . . already ran off to pack and draw evacuation lots and all that
. . . waited until they were gone . . . thought I’d just
let whoever was calling say goodbye . . . ”

I had to switch to the direct CL feed to
understand him, but even that was fading.

“ . . . because I know what’s going to
happen. I’m going to have deadman’s fear. That’s why they don’t recommend you
back up at the absolute last minute, because if you capture that feeling you
never forget it, you have to have them cut it out of you and it’s a mess, and
it doesn’t always work. Because I’m feeling it now, you know. I’ll come back
around when they kick my backup into a new instance, but it’ll know, it’ll know
it’s just a ... a copy, not . . . not
this
. That’s why I liked
your plan, Cioran! The real thing, the original, rescued at the last moment,
preserved, surrounded again by life—even I can see the romance in that! And
that’s why I’ve always liked you; you’ve let yourself have romance. Maybe I’ll
even get over my fear, you know? I’ll be back in a new instance and wondering
why I ever worried about it . . . But it won’t be
me
, it won’t
be the me that’s
here, here, here
!
It won’t be this!
Whatever
‘this’ is! There
is
something here, like nothing else anywhere!”