Flight of the Vajra (95 page)

“Enid, Angharad,” I called out, “pass the word
along. We’re loading the first refugees now. Anyone who’s not crated up and
queued up
now
, do it.” I didn’t imagine we had any stragglers, since the
flood of people through the gate had slowed to a trickle and then stopped
entirely. That and anyone still dawdling around outside was apt to become a
puddle, what with ambient air temperature hitting 50°C and climbing fast.

The first layer of pods loaded up and wound around
the
Vajra III
without needing a single nudge from me. The crew area we
were in was gyro-mounted and could rotate independently of the rest of the
ship, so all we felt was a slight jostling every so often. Likewise, the inside
of each pod had gyroscopics, so those on the “top” of the ship (at least while
we were gravity-bound) wouldn’t have to feel like they were standing on their
heads.

At this rate, I thought, three hours to load, an
hour and change to lift off and break orbit, and another hour or so for the
engines to get their entanglement lock. Five hours—at which point the surface
of the planet would be literally boiling, but at least we would no longer be
on
it. The outside of the pods in question could more than handle the temperature
ranges in question, but all the same I set our exit pattern and flight path to
put us back in the planet’s shadow. One less thing to fret about.

Cosm alive, I told myself, we might actually pull
this off.

“The last of the eligible evacuees from the
planet’s Highend population is now off-world,” Ulli reported. “Or so I’ve just
been told.”

Cioran: “As a courtesy to the next customer, will
the last one leaving the planet please turn off the sun?”

Me: “Oh, if only.” Damn him, I thought, he
actually made me laugh with that one. “By the way. The refugee manifest
courtesy of the Caravan tells me all who requested a slot are present,
accounted for, and attached to the
Vajra
’s internal CL grid. If you were
planning to keep everyone occupied while we bust on out of here—”

“—then now’s a good time to start?” Cioran
replied. “My thoughts, too. How about we divide things up several ways? I’ll
provide the frivolity, Ulli can talk politics, Angharad can offer spiritual
support and a prayer or three, and . . . um . . . Kallhander
can read to everyone from the flight safety manual!”

“
 
‘In
the unlikely event of a hull breach, the interstitial auto-sealant will—’
 
” Kallhander droned out
about that much before all of us, him included, fell apart laughing.
“Actually,” he said a moment after we had sobered, “would there be an objection
if I joined Ulli for her discussion? My . . . perspective might
provide me with a good deal to contribute.”

“No, no. You come right on in,” Ulli said. “And I
agree: given where you’ve been and what you’ve done, I ought to have invited
you to join me anyway.”

“I’d like to join Angharad,” Ioné said. “For the
same reasons—my perspective. Perspectives, actually. Plural.”

“You are welcome,” Angharad said.

“And Henré and I have our hands full,” Enid said,
“especially since I’ve started getting a
lot
of people saying the
on-board waste system keeps getting stuck. I need to give these folks an
answer—”

“Wait, wait, I know what
that
is.” I
slapped my forehead. Yes, genius: what do you
think
will happen when you
take a waste handler designed for null gravity, but don’t bother to tell it to
lock itself when its gyrofeedback tells you it’s upside-down? It’s not like
anyone’s going to try taking a piss when they’re in that position anyway. I
pushed out a quick (and dirty, ha ha) fix for the problem and re-allocated a
slightly greater percentage of the in-pod substrate usage allotment for
disposable towels.

Somewhere during that time, the “talk shows”
started, but I wasn’t listening. Fixing the toilet issue had left me paranoid
about a dozen other things. Did the acceleration compensator stack have a
proper fail-safe in the event of a negative-G incident? Was the cross-layer
signal routing using up too much bandwidth? Did we have clearance enough down
below when we had the last of the modules loaded, so that we could apply
maximum thrust? No, wait, that last part didn’t matter—it was easy to forget
what we were leaving behind was all going to be destroyed.

The final modules were being pulled into position.
I let the conversations play out in one ear, so to speak, while watching the
last bits of everything click into place. Kallhander and Ulli were talking
about the way IPS is not inherently a political entity (in the sense of taking
sides), but always becomes politicized in the context of the society it serves;
not good, not evil, not neutral either. Cioran was yukking it up with what
sounded like a story about the time he got thrown off a planetary game
preserve, because he’d set up camp in a valley somewhere and had been hacking
the atmospheric feedback system to create a “wind concert” that in theory would
have lasted twelve days local time. The only way to “listen” was to CL into the
various herds of animals romping about in the preserve—all conveniently tagged
with CL for sensory input, for those whose vacations consisted of spending a
week experiencing the savannah from their point of view—and to adjust one’s sensory
timescaling appropriately. And if he ever got the chance to do it again
. . .

I switched over to Angharad and Ioné and let the
former’s words fill my inner ear as we did our final turn and prepped for
departure.

“—whether or not anyone was ready for it,” she was
saying. “But I took that stance anyway. I did not want to stand in anyone’s
way. I wanted to let the case for why coming to Bridgehead would have been a
dead end speak for itself. My mistake was in not understanding the true nature
of that dead end.”

Ioné: “You originally felt it was a matter of the
quality of the life that would be led there.”

“I did, but again, in the wrong way. It was not
strictly a matter of one exchanging an Old Way life for a Highend life, for
that happens on any number of other worlds in different degrees. Even if on
Bridgehead, it happened with that much more ferocity, with that much more
competition. It was because emigrating to Bridgehead would not provide a
long-term solution for all those who could not follow in their footsteps. It
would make life better for a select few, but not for all the rest. It would
become yet another end in itself, not a model for a way of life that others to
genuinely emulate. It only exists because the other choices are so few, or so
poor, that they are beneath consideration. It only exists because of the
century-long waiting list for new worlds. It only exists because the other
options have been untenable.

“Now, as Ioné just submitted, and as a few others
have pointed out, there have, in the past, been little splittings-off, various
sects that spin themselves off and attempt to attract new followers. But by and
large they have failed. They have failed to influence policy on the same level
as the Old Way, failed to garner the kind of critical social mass. They remain
obscurities. And not for lack of trying, either: the number of such attempts
beggars imagination. The child of a devotee to one such group is among us now,
as some of you must be aware.”

Final module docked, the
Vajra III
told me.
Initiating pre-launch system integrity cross-verification.

“There is no doubt in my mind any longer the Old
Way must change,” Angharad said. “But
how
this is to be done—it cannot
be done from the bottom, I fear. It must be done from . . . within.”
She’d all but said
from the top.
“It requires that one who already has
built trust amongst so many must ask others to follow in a new direction. I
debated with myself whether or not I had the right, for any number of reasons,
to attempt such a thing. I know now only what will happen if I do not.

“And so, here—as we flee in the wake of a dying
star, as we huddle like this—I ask all of you this: Will you walk with me? Not
just to follow, but so that all of us might align shoulder-to-shoulder, and
walk together towards something not yet known or seen, but somehow better. These
few nearest me who have said yes—you already know their names—they will be
walking side by side with you as well. I do not ask that you leave anything
behind, only that you see for yourselves if we can accomplish something
together, wherever we may be.

“Will you walk with me? You need not answer now,
or even after we have found a port to put into. This is an open question, not
just for those within the reach of my voice but for all and everywhere. And I
will ask it again and again.

“Will you walk with me?”

She’d stopped just short of declaring she was
stepping down, which I didn’t imagine would have gone down well with her
audience right now. Instead, she was just taking a detour with everyone else in
tow.

Poor Ulli and Cioran, I thought. I couldn’t
imagine anyone wanting to listen to the two of them right now, not with
Angharad offering her audience the single greatest question she’d ever asked
them in their lives.

With the cross-checks all in the green, I set the
controls for the heart of the sky.

Underneath us, the whole of the Prince’s estate
flattened out and became an impact crater under the invisible stamping heel of
the
Vajra III
’s repulsor field, a good three kilometers in diameter. The
resulting shockwave washed outwards and turned all the protomic structures
under us for kilometers around into a tidal wave of glittering pebbles and
flakes of slag.

The sun’s curve was jumping again,
enough
to make me nervous about how much time we had. The world outside had become a
sweaty fog of at first evaporating, and now boiling, water. All the
superstructures we’d built our impromptu launch pad and assembly ground on
could withstand much higher temperatures than 100°C, but anything Type D or
uninitiated Type E exposed to that kind of swelter was at a risk of malfunction
unless it was specifically formulated for extreme conditions. A good thing we’d
cut our umbilical and bailed before it got too steamy.

I didn’t switch to full CL input to duck out on the
crush of acceleration. No human pilot who takes his job seriously ever breaks
orbit while under CL sense-dep, especially not when he’s ferrying others. He
has to keep his senses attuned to what’s really going on: if it isn’t
comfortable for
him
, it isn’t likely to be comfortable for anyone
else
,
either, machine feedback be damned.

All the same, I pushed our takeoff as much as I
dared, and looped in some body-kinesthesia feedback from the passengers. Not a
one of them was experiencing the launch directly—all of them were either
huddling with each other or enjoying our fine on-board entertainments—but their
CLs and in-body protomics were all harvesting and forwarding data. These folks
may have eschewed backups—they retained at least that much Old Way baggage—but
they hadn’t opted completely out from all the life-enhancing goodies a place
like Bridgehead offered them, and so this passenger complement could stand a
fair beating from the acceleration I was dishing out.

Everything held together. And why wouldn’t it? I
told myself. A ball even this big is spaceworthy when evenly enveloped by the entanglement
engine mesh’s output, and we’re 135% within tolerance limits with the amount of
EE coverage we created. But the jitters I felt kicking through my gut weren’t
going to be soothed by just crossing off all the items on my flight checklist.
They were only going to unwind themselves once we’d cleared atmosphere, made a
lock-on, and leapt somewhere safer. And the bulk of the ship had nothing to do
with it either. I’ve managed bigger ships, I thought, but nothing with a cargo
this valuable.

I threw a sidelong CL glance at the discussions.
I’d been right: everyone, moderators included, had ditched out on their
respective talks to join Angharad, fire questions at her, and debate the
answers.

Q:
You yourself don’t have any idea what
the composition of this new society is, then?

A:
There are only three tenets
underpinning what I wish to create. First, it must provide us with a way to
simultaneously express our yearning to transcend and our need to accept grace. Second,
it must do this in the context of our everyday lives, not in some exclusive
subdivision of it. And third, it must do all this in a way that is compatible
with good governance and human dignity.

Q:
That’s all well and fine, but it
still seems terribly vague. And I have to add, how is it any different from the
professed offerings of any society that has come and gone across human history?
(That was Ulli, I noted.)

A:
It is different because you and I are
here contemplating it.
(Some laughter.)
No, I am sincere. That by itself
is the only difference that will ever matter. We allowed the power of
understanding those things to run away from each of us and become the province
of others, always others. I found myself becoming one of those others, much to
my shame. I tried time and again, here and there, to place the power back into
the hands of those who had surrendered it, only to find them surrendering it
yet again to someone else.

Q:
You can’t
keep
that from
happening! People live to shirk themselves!
(I didn’t know who this was.)

A:
It is not my intention to prevent it;
I agree, that is impossible. It is my intention to provide a space where they
will find they do not need to shirk it. I, or another like me, may provide them
with guidance, but only in the sense of a map showing the arrangements of the
roads. I cannot tell them where to go.