Flight of the Vajra (93 page)

Angharad had been wiping his tears since he’d said
the word
romance
for the first time, and here she moved to wipe his
forehead.

“All the same, though,” the Prince went on, “I’ll
get over it, I know I will! Just like everyone else does . . . But I
don’t
want to
! You hear me? I don’t want to get over it . . . because
then I’ll just do it again, and again . . . like everyone else does
. . . and I’ll never stop—being afraid—”

His tears continued to run, even as his real mouth
moved and made no sound. His CL voice had become a sad little boy’s mumble.

“Is it true that I’ll never exist again?” he said
(through CL only, now).

“Something will exist,” Angharad said, “but it
will not be ‘you’. What you choose to do with this understanding—”

“It
would
be wonderful to never exist
again, wouldn’t it?” He turned his head to see Ioné standing over him, then
kneeling next to him. “But I can’t do it. I can’t let go. Something will wake
up and it won’t even remember I cried like this. It’s better that way; that’s
what they all say.”

Ioné took his hand, and I watched as his fingers
twined feebly around hers and clung tight. That won’t keep you from sliding
away either, I thought.

“It’s all his fault, you know,” he went on, his CL
voice down to a whisper. “That kid, Marius. He promised me so much
. . . any world, all for the taking . . . but not even a
promise like that could ward off this feeling . . . ”

I was about to ask what he meant when he sent three
more words that were too feeble to be anything but his last:

What a shame.

It’s not a switch being thrown or a wire being cut
when someone dies, especially not over a CL connection. It’s like sunset: first
the sun itself is gone, then the light from the sky, then the light in the air
around you . . . but at some point you realize there’s nothing but
darkness now. And, likewise, one by one the connections from the Prince’s CL
all went first grainy and then flat.

No one stood up. Angharad, still cradling the dead
boy’s head, continued reciting the benediction she had started speaking under
her breath when Ioné had joined us. Enid, Ulli and Kallhander had all by that
point gathered a little closer—as had I, standing right behind Enid with my
hands on her shoulders. I could see her face through the ship’s sensory
surfaces, but one glimpse of how stricken it was told me I didn’t want to.

We knew full well when Angharad reached out to
close the eyes of his CL copy it would have no effect on the real body now
imaged to us only via the room’s sensors, but none of us were going to tell her
it was a stupid thing to do.

“Oh!” Cioran’s shout made everyone twitch—Enid
especially so, since she just about leaped out of my arms. “The deed! The land
deed, the ownership transfer—I’ve got it! Henré, here—the master site and
substrate control keys are all there, too! And the traffic control pass, and the
line-of-sight rights as well!” He flung all of them at me (even in CL, you can’t
help but duck when someone does that), seized a surprised Ulli by the cheeks
and gave her a kiss while pirouetting both of them around on one foot.

“What?” Cioran set her back down, frowning; Ulli’s
face was still set in the same pensive, distant mold it had been during the
whole scene we’d just witnessed.

“You’re awfully blithe,” she said, “about having
fleeced a dying man.”

“Dying, nothing! He said himself, he’s coming
back, and he didn’t cancel his final backup, last I checked.”

“I’ll amend. You’re awfully blithe about having
exploited a man in the grip of deadman’s fear.”

“And,” Angharad said, rising from where the
Prince’s body had lain a moment ago, “the scenario you outlined to him—you have
no plans of actually following through with creating such a thing from his
house, is that correct?”

“Well, I am planning to use what he sold me. Just
not quite in that way—”

“I also understand,” she went on in a much gentler
tone, “that you did this out of a need to make the best use of whatever you had
available to you. For that I can hardly condemn you. But you must know the fact
you did this only to do good for others may not by itself protect you from the
consequences.”

Cioran had something ready to say, but he
discarded it in favor of a long sigh and a deep nod. “Yes, of course,” he said,
“so if I’m happy about anything, it’s that we were able to salvage something
from the waste he was making of it all. If on his return he demands what I
promised, I’ll give him
something
. I owe him at least that much. Even
though I feel he hasn’t earned it one bit, I owe him at least that much. For
your
sakes.”

“As for whether or not he earned it,” Ulli said,
“we’ll just have to differ on that score, won’t we?”

“Ulli, what’s all this knicker-twisting over
particulars?! I just helped save hundreds of thousands of people!”

“Yeah,” I said, “and if you’re going to put it like
that, I’ll wish you hadn’t.”

Angharad composed
the message. Enid
helped get the word out.

From I, Angharad, to all of Bridgehead: if you
lack transport off the planet, make your way to the palace of the belated
Prince Nancelares. Bring only what you must.

The original draft of the message had said
to
all Old Way of Bridgehead.
She’d changed it at the last moment.

The note also contained some quickie schematics
for the cargo pods we’d be cramming everyone into, so the refugees would have some
idea of the cubic meterage they had to work with. We threw together a
quick-and-dirty census form to be correlated against the planet’s public
citizenship database—something for people to let us know that, yes, they were
on their way and wanted a seat in their name.

I had my protomic doc-node mix me up a stimulant
cocktail guaranteed to keep me awake for at least another solar day, knowing
full well what it would cost me later on. I’d be in enough pain, not just
physical and mental, that the only things strong enough to knock that out would
also knock
me
out—but by that point, we’d either have earned some rest,
or we’d all be sleeping forever.

First thing to do: bulldoze the palace. Start with
the spot nearest the gated ground path . . . eh, get rid of the gate,
while we’re at it, and widen the road, too. This whole estate’s a giant
mountain of substrate, thirty meters down—plus the reservoir under it—and we’ve
got an unlimited energy budget to sculpt it (doubly so what the sun
exploding
),
so there’s no point in being stingy. Tear everything down in a spiral outwards
from where the main road terminates, and instantiate a “wellhead” for the
substrate reservoir. Funnel the substrate up from there and pipe it into a
mini-manufaxture, whose job is to do nothing but build the cargo units for the
refugees. We’ll figure out how to add the engines later . . . assuming
they ever arrive in time.

By the time the teardown process had made a dent,
a couple of hours had already gone by. I sped things up as far as I could, to
the point where, as per Cavafy’s lecture about tradeoffs, more substrate was
turning to slag than was being used for actual construction. It didn’t matter;
we had an ocean of substrate waiting to be tapped, and if we didn’t use it in
some form it was all going to be boiled off into space anyway.

Ralpartha to Angharad. Why are there refugees
massing near Nancelares Manor? More to the point, why did you ask them to do
that?

Enid shot me a digest of the solar observation
data, both pro- and am-. The output curve had mercifully flattened out to
something linear. “That’s still gonna leave us only fifty-one local hours,
max,” she said.

“What about factoring in night-versus-day
differences?” I said. “Sun going down has got to buy us some time where we
are.”

“From what I see, that’s with diurnal temperature
variation already in there.” An hour ago, I thought, she probably didn’t even
know the word
diurnal.
Now thanks to her steeping herself in the sea of
data amassed by the crowds outside, she not only knew the word but had used it
correctly in a sentence. Now let’s see if any of it sticks, assuming we get out
of here uncharred.

Angharad to Ralpartha. See attached [meaning
the Prince’s deeds to the property, including exit and entry rights, orbital
traffic passage, et many other ceteras].

“Henré,” Ulli called out, “there’s a group calling
themselves ‘Planet Caravan’, a coalition of refugees who were in the process of
assembling their own transport. They’ve also been coordinating with a relief
effort being spearheaded by some students on Omn Leva. The Caravan is wondering
if this constitutes a duplication of effort.”

“Good call. Send them my way.” See? I told myself.
You weren’t alone. And that only made what you’re doing all the more important.

Henré to Planet Caravan. See attached for
schematic of modular escape system being instantiated at (former) site of
Prince’s estate. Modules will be ganged together for collective exit via the
estate’s skyway with engines being drop-shipped from offworld through same
skyway. Any technical assistance you can provide will be most welcome.

“IPS ground units are converging on the estate’s
access road,” Ioné said, and sent me a live tactical. “Converging” wasn’t the
word: even at 1-meter resolution, the blizzard of red dots on the map that
represented IPS had merged into one giant, undulating blot. The refugees, a
river of white and green sprinkles on the road to the estate, had stopped their
forward flow.

Enid patched me into a first-person mosaic
courtesy of a few in the refugee troupe who were the closest thing that group
had to a leader. Most were in ground-cars; a few had arrived in bodycycles; a
few had popped the hatches on their vehicles and were standing around outside.

A crowd of people who’d left their vehicles behind
had congregated right at the roadblock. There, IPS had stippled the road with gel-mines
and parked their troop transports behind them in a chevron formation. Laser
sights threw glittering red lines back and forth—not that an IPS man needed one
of those to get a dead shot on someone, but some form of targeting visible to
the Old Way eye was mandated for use in the presence of civilians.

Overhead a helio circled one of the transports below,
which aimed a pulse gun at it and fired with a
bzzt-whunk
that you felt
as much as you heard. The helio shuddered and dipped dangerously, its lifts
faltering. One shot from such a cannon would make you lose altitude; two would
send you nosediving.

“This is an illegal obstruction,”
the group
leader broadcast.
“We’re responding to an official diplomatic invitation to
this property!”

THIS AREA IS CLOSED TO GROUND AND AIR TRAFFIC.
WITHDRAW IMMEDIATELY.

—
Enid,
I CLed,
tell our friends to back
off a bit and sit down. We’ll get that gate open from the inside.

Ralpartha to Angharad. We are going to verify
the legitimacy of this deed.
(I couldn’t imagine him saying that any other
way except through gritted teeth.)

Angharad to Ralpartha. The legitimacy of that deed
should be self-evident. Is the chain of custody on the included signatures not
enough?

The helio that had been zapped touched down in a
hilly clearing to one side of the road, then disgorged half a dozen or so
people, all shaking and stumbling as they walked. One of them, a woman with
ropy musculature was visible even under her jacket, had on a sleeve whose
bulked-up, heavy-duty look would have given it away as a weapons array even if
the orange warning ring around the wrist hadn’t. I wasn’t about to waste time
speculating where she’d filched something that off-the-books.

—
Enid, you tag that?
I CLed.
Live arms
on your ten.

—I see her, but none of the bodies I’m peeping
through are willing to be loaners!

—Just find some way to make sure she doesn’t do
anything stupid. Even if it’s only throwing confetti in her eyes.

—Aye aye, cap’n.

The shouting got louder:

“Your obstruction of this road is endangering
civilian lives!”

“This area is no longer government property,
you slags!”

“Exit rights! Exit rights!”

One of the shouters stumbled across a gel-mine and
was enbubbled in a giant glob of Type D with a loud, flatulent hiss. Two of his
friends wrestled him aside and set to work peeling him out. He wouldn’t
suffocate inside it, but he’d have a vile taste in his mouth for hours and be
dyed green for days.

—
Kallhander,
I called out,
is there
anything—

—All of our command access has been revoked. We
can only use the same resources as you now.

Expected as much, I thought. I checked Enid’s
feeds again: Miss Armaments was making her way to the front of the crowd. No
prizes for guessing what happens as soon as she’s out in front and has a clear
shot, I thought.

“Exit rights! Exit rights! Exit rights!”

—
Enid, find
someone
in that crowd
willing to do a body-loan.
I shot her a schematic of that gun-sleeve; there
weren’t that many ways to jam it but I wanted her to know all of them.

—
I’m on it, I swear!

Angharad to Ralpartha. The deed is legal and
valid. I repeat: Remove your men.

The only answer Angharad got from Ralpartha was a
canned
STAND BY
warning. He knows the crowd’s unruly; all he has to do
is wait for one person to do something stupid. For all we know, he’d done a
little work to make sure someone
did
do something stupid.