Flight of the Vajra (96 page)

Q:
Again, it all sounds fine in the
abstract, but details. Details.

A:
If I were to say, “The details are to
be created by all of us in time”, you would reject that as well, even if it is true.
You want to be told where to go, even when I have just said I cannot do this.
But very well; here is what I envision.

There will be a place, governed by us as best
we can as a group, wherein each of us begins with the understanding that a panoply
of choices exist for existing. We may choose to live indefinitely; we may
choose not to; that will be for each to decide in turn.

The difference is that we will present this
choice to ourselves with the full knowledge of what each choice will cost, both
ourselves and others. There will be a cost for those who choose to prolong
themselves—a tax on their immortality, if you will. But it will not be a
financial one; it will be a spiritual one. Those who place themselves that much
further out of the reach of the ravages of time and happenstance must use an
incrementally greater amount of that time to be of service to the whole.

You are all aware of the paradox of the
Highend: the longer one lives, the less one ought to see any one minute of
one’s life as valuable, for there is always another to be found somehow beyond
it. And yet those of the Highend fight to keep every minute they have, real or
imagined, all for themselves! You have seen it, I’m sure. They grow not more
selfless, but entirely the opposite. You saw no end of proof of that these past
few days.

But this I have also seen: with all those who
thrive the most in their perpetuity, it is because they have invested it back
into others. It is not because they saw the act of living as its own closed
end. I welcome all those who would live either short or long, provided they are
willing to work diligently towards this understanding. And so, yes, everything
outside of that is merely marginalia, footnotes.

Q:
A shame, because it’s just those
footnotes and marginalia people are going to read first!
(Ulli again.
Laughter followed her words once more.)

A:
You are quite right. And I imagine
they will believe it to be a terrible system, at first. I will reply only that
it is the
least
worst thing I could come up with!

I took advantage of that moment, right when
everyone was laughing and suitably disarmed, to slip in word edgewise that we
had reached maximum speed and would be out of the atmosphere within the hour.
Nothing like a little more good news in everyone’s ear to let them think a
little less about us outrunning a so-called nova (see, they even had a stickler
like me calling it that now).

Now, the flight manifest. Next stop, as per
Ralpartha’s orders to Kallhander and Ioné: Omn Leva—a Highend planet and an IPS
world, sure, but also a university world, and one where thanks to the Escape
Maneuvers folks the student body could be counted on to pledge their help. And
there might well be plenty of other people there, some of whom I could even
call by their first names without blushing, and whose arms we could twist
(albeit gently) to make something happen in the long term. Most any planet
could absorb a few hundred thousand people on temporary tourist visas, but not
allow them to stay. Doubly so after the planet they’d fled from had suffered an
internal insurrection
and
had its own sun blow up.

“Also,” Enid told me, “we’ve been getting no end
of feedback from people telling us where we might go after Omn Leva. ‘I know
folks on this world’ is the single biggest thing I keep hearing. Might want to
heed that.”

She was right. That and I’d been so absorbed in
the mission of just getting everyone off the rock that I hadn’t lent a single
brain cell to where they would
go
, even if only as a stop-over.

“Um. I suppose Formynx is straight out, then,”
Cioran said.

The flood of suggestions (read: demands) from the
on-board populace were all scattershot. Most of them were just pleading for the
chance to go to a world where they knew someone, however distantly, whatever
the chance was that they were in power and could get something done. Some were
more than willing to leave and assume the sole responsibility for wherever they
ended up, but none of us—Angharad doubly so—wanted to saddle them with such a
choice this early on.

I was still sorting through my list of who to chat
up on Omn Leva when I got a collective page from the folks on board who’d
tagged themselves as “astronomically literate”. The solar output curve had
hiccupped again. Wait, they told me, it gets worse. The orbital observer
stations were still functioning and transmitting public feeds—although no bets
on how long before they melted down—and from all they were sending back, we
were looking at a wavefront of superheated stellar matter on its way to us in a
matter of hours. And by
hours
it was better to say
minutes
.
Punching the acceleration wasn’t going to fix this problem, since there was no
way we could outrun something like that on conventional EE sublight propulsion.

I started the entanglement engine lock-on search,
even when I knew full well I wasn’t going to get anything useful just yet. And
even after minutes on end, it didn’t look like I was going to get anything
useful, period: the sheer amount of solar radiation flux, even in the planet’s
shadow (which was growing more harshly delineated with every passing minute),
was going to make a lock-on take forever. Normally a situation like that
wouldn’t bother me: if you had a local solar body that was screwing with your
entanglement triangulation, you took a few hours to recalibrate, brewed some
coffee in the meantime, and forgot about it. But most people never did such a
thing in the shadow of a nova—and at the rate the curve was rising, we didn’t
have a few of
anything
.

Enid’s words cut through my fog. “Henré, I’ve got
a
lot
of people wondering why we haven’t jumped yet—”

“I know, I
know
!”

“Look, if you can’t tell them what’s going on, at
least tell me.”

“If we don’t get a jump lock sometime in the next
twenty minutes, we’re gonna be recycled starstuff. Poached alive long before
then, though.”

She picked her next words carefully, like they
were going to cut her if she handled them the wrong way: “Then
I’ll tell them you’re doing the best
you can
. Because I know
that’s
not going to be a lie.”

I let her go and pass on exactly those words while
I stared at the entanglement lock results and tried to find what forlorn hope I
could in one noise reduction algorithm or another.
The best you can
,
she’d said. We always take it on face value when someone says they did the best
they could. Who has the gall to confront another and tell them, no, you didn’t
do your best? Either a sadist, or someone who knows you all too well.

The pod hull sensors started squawking about both excessive
radiation and temperature. I let them yammer at me for a bit; maybe they’d goad
me into finding an answer—

The answer that had been staring at me all along.

You Type-B-for-brains, I groaned at myself. This
is what you get for letting yourself forget how things were done on a ship the
size of the
Kyritan
. There, you didn’t just perform the entanglement
lock through whatever most forward engine there was—
you used every engine on
the ship
, remember? Both for redundancy and accuracy. Only you’ve been
tooling around for so long in those one-engine jobs that you never bothered to
do the same thing here in this big beast . . .

It took less than a second to gang together the
control interfaces for the entire array of available engines, and aggregate
their entanglement results. The noise levels from the what-was-once-a-sun
behind us receded like low tide, and the signal lock came together less than
five minutes after that. I doubted I’d set any universal records for fastest
lock ever acquired, but it had to be a personal best.

The shadow of Bridgehead vanished—and, briefly, so
did everything else.

The universe around us was now bright but cold,
with the single white coal of Omn Leva’s star dead ahead.

I unpacked myself from my flight couch, climbed
hand-over-hand up into the cabin where Angharad and Enid were staring at the space
around them and hollering with joy, and threw my arms around them both from
behind.

We spent the next hour or so
enjoying a
greatly-postponed bit of celebration
.
Cioran broke open more bottles from the stash he’d lifted from the villa, then shared
out via CL, for the benefit of all those canned up in the refugee pods, the
flavor of one of the more exotically-colored specimens he’d liberated. I had a
swig of it myself, then another one, and then before I knew it the two of us
had killed that particular vessel. Enid grabbed the bottle from me, swigged
from the dregs, then crossed her eyes and spat that whole mouthful right across
Cioran’s knees.

“I guess you’re not ready for
that
yet,”
Ulli teased.

“No!” Enid shook her head. “I think more of my
taste buds need to
die
first.”

There was nothing else for us to do but sit tight
and party. We’d sent out a beacon to be picked up by whatever defenses were
patrolling Omn Leva’s space, and were now waiting for both an answer, which
would take minutes to arrive anyway—and an escort, which could take hours. Make
that a whole armada of escorts; for something as big as we were, they would
want to send over everything they could get their hands on just to be safe.

Over in one corner, Kallhander and Ioné clinked
glasses and looked pensive. In truth, it was only Kallhander who looked pensive,
but I’d seen how he could summon enough smoldering gloom for any three men.
Ioné sported a freshly-reinstantiated version of her foundational sprightly
cheer.

“We were toasting to the end of our current
careers,” Ioné said, on seeing me approach them, “and perhaps the beginnings of
new ones.”

“After that last little bit of drama Ralpartha
pulled,” I said, “I’d be quit too.”

“It’s not the entire service I want to turn my
back on,” Kallhander said. “I had no delusions that men like Ralpartha existed,
or that IPS politics could manifest itself so . . . nakedly. But I
was always one, sometimes two steps away from the reality of it.” He refilled
his glass from the squat, evening-sky-colored bottle next to them. “If all they
demand of me is probation, desk duty, retraining—that means at the end of it,
if my record is clean once again, I can ask to return to whatever duty I
please.”

“Is this where you’d want to come back to?” I
said. “Liaison to Angharad, and whatever she’s cooking up?”

“I know what they’ll say,” Ioné said. “
 
‘Anything but that.’
 
”

“Yes; ‘anything but that’, most likely.”
Kallhander put the bottle on the floor and the stopper back in the bottle with a
slam from the heel of his hand, as if trying to drive the bottle right through
the deck. “And if that is their answer, then I know what mine will be as well.”

I felt uncomfortable in a way another drink wasn’t
likely to help with.

“I want this,” Kallhander went on. He chose his
words with the same surgical care Enid had used earlier when saying
I’ll
tell them you’re doing the best you can
. “Everything before this has seemed
like a compromise. There always seemed to be something better waiting beyond
the choices I had made. That I could never find that something better never caused
me to stop believing it existed. I know now it lies in this thing Angharad
wishes to create.”

“Kallhander,” I said, putting my hand over the
stopper on the bottle, “for all you know, you’ve still got a career. Plus, Ralpartha
has got to be facing more disciplinary action than you are as soon as he puts
into port. Let all that play out first, and
then
see if your gut’s
sending the same signals. And then, ignore it.” I sat myself down right in his
field of vision, between him and Ioné. “Because everything you’re talking about
is the same thing that ate me up from the inside for too many years. The
delusion that the real thing, whatever it is, is always just over that hill, or
behind that cloud. Look where chasing all that got me.”

And then I did the single worst thing I could have
done to my argument: I gestured around me. I caught onto my mistake the second
after Ioné laughed into her cupped hand, and Kallhander surveyed the party
going on around us with approvingly high eyebrows.

“I’d say it hasn’t led you all that far astray,”
he said, and drank again.

I laughed at myself—what else could I do?

For too long all I’d been able to see was the
failure—everything that had happened before Enid had run into me in the mouth
of that alley. Only the failures had mattered, and even a great success like
this wasn’t a “success”. We still had to find a final port to put into, still formally
break the news of Angharad’s schism (and see what repercussions
that
would send through the rest of the galaxy), still shoulder up so many other
things, the weight of any one of which was enough for me to feel nothing had
been achieved.

But it wasn’t true, and I knew it now. Look where
chasing all that got me, I thought: the pride and respect of some very fine
people indeed. The close company of others I wouldn’t now trade up for any
other thing, past or present.

Well, I asked myself, what if you
did
have
the chance to trade it up? Isn’t that what you’ve been chasing in spirit this
whole time, a way to feel like Biann and Yezmé never lost you (it was never
me
losing
them
; I always turned it around in my mind, as it hurt a little
less that way)? But even if you had them now . . .

I took the bottle in both hands and undid the
stopper again.

. . . Well, even if I had the two of them
now, they wouldn’t be with the same man they’d left behind, would they? I said
to myself. And wouldn’t that be, in a way you could have never seen before, a
good thing?

I dispensed an empty shotglass and filled it. “To
being led astray,” I said. That seemed to sit well with Kallhander and Ioné,
who echoed my toast.

I looked back over to where Cioran was busy wiping
off his shins, Enid was bobbling back and forth between him and Ulli, and
Angharad was shaking her head at all of them like a mother with too many children.

The folks at Omn Leva
all sounded like
they’d lost a bet. They’d received word through the jumpnet about Bridgehead
melting down (although it would be a few dozen years before the light from the
incident reached them), and had barely finished mulling the implications of all
that before we’d popped out on their doorstep. They were polite, but I could
tell from the fluster and fret behind their words that they had no idea where
to even put us at first.

It wasn’t the students who were this morose, or
even the few faculty members who had sided with the students, and were all
sending their well-wishings. It was the planetary administration, which seemed
surprised that its own people were capable of, let alone desirous of, something
as far-reaching as offering provisional shelter for a few hundred thousand
refugees. This wasn’t supposed to be their job.

While the tugs arrived and escorted us planetside,
I went back and forth with their chief of planetary infrastructure—the mere
mention
of that job title now put a squirm into my marrow—and worked out a landing
system. Tying up the elevator was out of the question, so they grudgingly granted
us one-time clearance to do a free atmospheric descent over the Thekala Sea.
Even if we crashed full-tilt into that body of water, the resulting tides
wouldn’t do anything more than batter into a bunch of mountain ranges. The
planet’s inhabited zone was a hundred or so kilometers on the other side of
that mountain ridge, and so the plan was to unwind the bunched-up necklace that
was the
Vajra III
, snake it out through that pass, and park it all in a sculpted
field about six kilometers from Omn Leva Central Campus. Leaving the planet
involved doing roughly the same thing in reverse, using the sea as an impromptu
repulsion pad—something normally not done because of the tidal flux it would
create, but one such touchdown and launch wasn’t likely to mess up the aquatic
ecosystem (or the shorelines) too badly.

Angharad chatted with the president and the dean,
who as soon as she spoke to them had nothing but effusive praise for her and
the “impromptu team” she’d gathered together around her to handle this crisis.
They were happy to provide a layover for everyone, but anything beyond a few
days would be “problematic”. They did promise to talk it over with us in
person, though.

The ride overland took longer than the atmospheric
descent. There was a local substrate dump which we used to refit the pods for
ground travel—no charity measure there; the bill for that went on our
collective tab—and I spent almost the entire ride glowering out the main deck
viewport at some of the most gorgeous mountain ranges anywhere. All
deliberately uninhabited no thanks to the planet’s very stern population caps,
same as any other IPS-signatory world. And no, I thought, they won’t even let
you chisel a hole in the mountainside and wrap yourselves in fur and live there,
because then they’d have to let everyone else do it, too.

 “I shouldn’t have expected them to be anything
more than polite,” I said to Angharad. She was in the couch next to mine,
watching the same view I was, taking a breather from sifting through the
refugees’ feedback (join Angharad: 36%; go somewhere else: 51%; not sure yet:
13%).

“It isn’t as if we need them to be our saviors,”
Angharad said. “Some are choosing to leave here and find their own way, and I
for one am grateful they are allowing the use of their planet for just such a
thing.”

“It’s just reminding me of all the things I was
trying not to be.” I slapped my fingernails against the viewport. “How many of
whoever else is on this planet is just going to sit back and watch us arrive?
How many of them are going to shrug and say, ‘I can’t help them; that’s their
own business’, or ‘They’ve got the Kathaya with them, what do they need me
for’?”

“Are you willing to be proven wrong?”

“I would
love
to be proven wrong.”

Enid, still swaying a bit from her aborted
experiments with alcohol, informed me I had a request for a direct
conversation—from one of the folks who’d spearheaded the Planet Caravan group.
“Name’s Pinoa Tallia,” Enid told me, “and he’s actually been trying to bend
your ear for a while now. I figured you weren’t
too
swamped with
anything right now.”

I gave Angharad a we-should-continue-this-later
nod. “Let’s chat with the man.”

Pinoa could have been a brother to Nishi, down to
the athlete’s bulk that made his shoulders broad enough to take out the frames
of doorways. His smile just about shouted down my own—not deliberately, I’m
sure, which only made it all the more intimidating to be on the receiving end
of. I did my best to look at ease, even when he bear-hugged me (which, even
when delivered in CL-space, made me cough out a laugh).

“I’ll tell you,” Pinoa said, “there’s about a
hundred thousand some-odd other people who want to line up and do that to you
in turn.”

“Wow. Don’t scare me like that.” I took my seat
again, next to where Angharad sat patiently. Despite being next to me
physically, she sported a grayed-out CL overlay indicating she hadn’t been made
a party to the discussion.

“They can’t thank you enough; that’s why!” Pinoa
went on. “We were trying to pull together our own exit plan when you gave us
one of the most crucial missing pieces. No, two. You gave us the means to get
out of there, and Angharad gave us the support to endure the experience. We
needed both. A lot of us—me included—we didn’t think we would survive.” Whenever
he seemed on the verge of stopping, he’d start up again in a slightly parallel
vein. “It’s frightening—there’s so many of you, all trying, all struggling, and
at the same time there’s only so much that all your work adds up to. And then
one person comes in and changes all that.”

“It wasn’t just one person,” I said. “It was me,
and
you,
and
—” I gestured “around”. “—and everyone else who chose to do
something and not just sit and wait.”

“I know that. I’m thanking
you
. Because you
could have sat that one out if you wanted to.”

I laughed. “My days of sitting things out are
over.” There, just like that; I’d said it. “—Listen, about you and your group,
have you decided what you’re going to be doing?”

“Well, we’re not deciding to stay or go as a
group, and I don’t mind that. We came together for the sake of just getting
everyone to safety, and . . . mission accomplished. Everything after
that’s our own choices.”

“How about you yourself?”

His mouth opened; he hesitated. “This is going to
sound a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase from what I just talked about,
but . . . I think I
am
going to sit out and watch for what
happens next. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the Kathaya something fierce. But
what she’s talking about just sounds like it needs more . . . focus?
No patch on anyone who wants to join that project. We just all finished having
one adventure, and I’m looking to get my life back together before plunging
into
another
one. And I hope this doesn’t come off the wrong way, but
. . . let’s face it, you’ve got a lot more of the kinds of resources
that come in handy for taking those kinds of risks. I’m just one guy who was
lucky enough to be in the right place for a lot of other people, and now that
I’ve done that, it’s time for something a little less crazy.”

That sort of being in the right place for people
counts as a resource, too, I thought; the kind some folks bleed all their lives
for and never get a hint of in return. But I knew better than to say that out
loud. I couldn’t tell him he was wrong for sitting this out any more than he
could convince me I’d been indispensable. I had to believe that on my own.