Flight of the Vajra (98 page)

“Any sign of Marius or his friends?” Odds were, I
figured, he would have more than one Aram handy wherever he was going.

“Nope. Not officially, anyway. But
un
officially
. . . rumor mill’s spewing out theories left, right, top, and bottom.
Biggest one so far is that he’s commandeered some remote fab yard—”

“Like, oh, Exoluft’s Therin-Thalya?”

“You mind-reader, you! That name came up more than
once.”

“Given that Mylène used to all but run the place,
I can see why.” Back when she was still Mylène, I thought, but odds ran high
Marius had harvested everything he could from her about that period of her
life.

“Plus,” Enid went on, “it’s pretty far out of the
way, very secretive, the kind of place where if something
did
go wrong
even the owners wouldn’t want to talk about it. And Exoluft has this very
snippy little statement to the effect that there’s nothing to see, so move
along.”

I pinged for Kallhander but he wasn’t talking at
the moment—he and Ioné were still dealing with the local branch office, which
made his silence all the more ominous. “If Marius & Co. are there,” I said,
“IPS has to know about it by now, even if nobody’s saying anything outwardly.”

“If he’s there, and we find him,” Enid said, “I
get dibs on decking him one.”

“I’ll kneel on him while you punch,” Cioran
offered.

I’d forgotten how much more fun it was to have
someone else by your side to make sense of these things. Sure, a filtering
algorithm could make you feel more informed, but by itself it could never let
you feel that much less alone against everything.

We took a moment to bring Enid and Cioran up to
speed on developments on our end. “Wow,” Enid said, “there’s always an excuse
for them to say no, isn’t there?” She seemed a little less beaten-down than the
rest of us, but you could still hear the bitterness eating its way out of each
word.

“There always has been and there always will be,”
Ulli said. “It’s not that there isn’t room enough; it’s not that there isn’t
compensation enough. It isn’t even as if there aren’t any number of places
planetside that wouldn’t let a lost soul live there. It’s always the ones at
the top who say no, because none of them want to be the first to say yes and
set a bad precedent. A hundred thousand now, that’s one thing. They’ll find
places—here, somewhere else. It’s not them that we should worry about. It’s the
next one, and the next, and the next, when we have billions and trillions who suddenly
have nowhere to go.”

“Or who just plain die,” Cioran threw in, “before
ever setting so much as a foot on the first ladder-rung leading off-world.”

“Which means our next move,” I said, “apart from
getting safely to wherever we’re going and setting up shop there, assuming they
want us in the first place, is to get some consciousness-raising going. There’s
just enough of a general feeling floating around that whatever happened wasn’t
random—and you already know I think it’s bound to happen again, and sooner
rather than later. And to a world that has a lot more at stake.”

I tried Kallhander again. This time, I connected
immediately. The look on his face told me there was no good news to be had from
him either. Instead of speaking, he held up his sleeve; Ioné, next to him in
whatever transport they were in, did the same. No orange chevrons, and no
telltale bulk for the built-in weaponry for their clothes, either.

“Oh
cosmos
,” I said. “They bounced you?
They bounced both of you?”

“Field probation,” Kallhander said. “We’re little
more than glorified observers now. And our access to IPS internal data
resources was also discontinued. There may be other retroactive penalties based
on what we accessed through the system—”

“What about Ralpartha? What’s
his
slap on
the wrist?”

“He’s not facing disciplinary action, at least not
yet.” Ioné began to unzip her sleeve from around her shoulder, briefly exposing
the fine-veined inner structure of the suit’s fabric. “The petition calling for
an inquest into his handling of the evacuation has received quite a few
signatures, but IPS policy regarding disciplinary actions requires an internal
hearing first—and there’s been a counter-statement signed by most everyone
evacuated by IPS from Bridgehead attesting to his professionalism, courtesy,
and . . . well, I suppose I don’t need to go on.”

“How long before you get your badges back?”

“Months at best,” Kallhander said. “The only
reason we haven’t been given desk assignments is because we were ordered to
remain with Angharad, at her discretion.”

“So if I were to dismiss you,” Angharad said,
“your utility to them would be at an end. You still remain useful to them as
long as you are their conduit to me.”

“We still have orders to return intelligence reports,
yes. With further penalties possible for submitting fraudulent or misleading
surveillance.”

Enid let out a mirthless laugh. “And it’s like
Henré said—they can pretty much make up any reason they want for thinking you
lied to them, can’t they?”

The two nearly-former IPS officers half-smiled.

“Fast learner, isn’t she?” Cioran said.

“Well.” Enid shrugged and wrinkled her mouth. “Sometimes
I wish I wasn’t.”

“We did learn one other thing,” Kallhander said,
“before our internal access was pulled. There was an unexpected interruption of
communications from Rollain. Interrupted and then restored after three missed
communications cycles. It might be nothing more than a faulty planetary relay,
but IPS has dispatched a team to look into it.”

“Rollain?” Enid said. “Well, it’s not like there’s
much of anyone there
yet
.”

“No,” I said, “but when you have a terraform in
progress with whole
planetful
of raw substrate to play with, that does
expand your options for doing terrible things, now, doesn’t it?”

Her: “ . . . Oh.” Dismal.

Me: “Yeah.” Doubly dismal.

“Also, the dispatched team is . . . rather
large,” Ioné went on. “Over a hundred officers, which seems excessive for
something that outwardly routine. And the only way we found out the team
complement at all was because of a traffic routing order annotation. It wasn’t
described in the actual memo for internal circulation.”

“How many rules did you break finding
that
out?” I said.

“I’m not sure any are left for me to break.” There
was a pause, and then she continued. “You see, I also may have a possible
candidate for our resettlement.”

The even longer lull that followed suggested that
she had everyone’s attention.

“Continuum’s Central Heuristics just sent me a
communiqué,” she continued. “They are offering the provisional use of space for
the construction of a settlement.”

I was the first one to say what most everyone else
must have been thinking: “A settlement? On Continuum? —Enid, check the
temperature in hell, would you?”

Ioné forged ahead, her enthusiasm spiking. “Continuum’s
entire presence in IPS is based on a whole series of provisional treaties which
have been extended indefinitely, and which create all sorts of opportunities—”

“The precise word is
loopholes
,” I said.

“Oh, and what loopholes they are!” Ulli leapt in. “There’s
no official population cap, since its population statistics are not computed in
the traditional way.”

Ioné shook her head. “Any risks we would run
welcoming an influx of this size would be a good deal easier for us to handle. And
there’s no end of actual room, of course.”

“That’s never been the problem with any world,” I
said. “It’s always about
why
they’re there, not
where
. So why
would they say yes now?”

“From what Central Heuristics forwarded me, it
seems they feel this would be an opportunity for both of us.” Ioné turned to
Kallhander to say this, whose face during this whole talk had become smoothed
over with amazement.

“Well,” I said. “As long as you think they’ll
welcome us, and as long as no one’s stomachs are turned by the idea of being
Continuum’s guest . . . I heartily second
that
motion.”

“Thirded,” Angharad said.

Ulli and Cioran, together: “Fourth’d.”

Enid stuck her hand up. “Fifth’ed.”

Kallhander raised his own hand, entwined as it was
with Ioné’s.

By the time
we packed up the
Vajra
III
, word about our intended final destination had circulated through the
passengers courtesy of Enid. “So far,” she told me, “the consensus is along
those lines: ‘Works for me, although I’m not sure I’d want to
live
there.’ And a small margin of folks who hate, hate, hate the idea.” She
shrugged. “Well, you know what they say about trying to make
everyone
happy—you can’t, so don’t.”

The final headcount for those following us to
Continuum fell to some twenty-one thousand and change. I’d grown accustomed to
what Angharad looked like when she was trying outwardly to take strife in
stride, and failing. She’d been silent almost the entire time since we’d
returned from campus, but not the serene kind of silence she normally exuded—she
was sunken down into herself, and sinking further every time we looked at her.
Enid brought her tea and some ration-pack cookies while we were reassembling
the ship-snake, and an hour later as we were humping between the mountains she
came back and discovered them untouched.

“That’s bad,” Enid said. “She
never
turns
down the cookies.”

Ioné sat with Angharad and was able to get her to
open up, but only incrementally. “This mission,” Angharad said at last, “these
efforts of ours . . . ”

“It isn’t all your burden alone,” Ioné said.

“Would that such was my worry . . . ”
Angharad put the side of her head against the window and closed her eyes. “This
thing I wish to give birth to—all I know it by is what it is
not
. In
many ways it is the opposite of, and a very poor substitute for, a real child.
You know that your child will be the sum of you and your beloved, in some
fashion; and perhaps you take that many more steps to find out exactly how.
There is a great deal less of wondering what it will not be, for most of that
is absurd or pointless. It will not be a cat, or a dog, or a . . . a stone
with feathers.”

Ioné laughed at that last part. I had to wonder if
she felt ill-equipped to hear out Angharad talking about progeny—or, for that
matter, if Angharad herself felt ill-equipped talking about it in the first
place.

“At first I told myself,” Angharad went on, “
 
‘This is nothing to let
worry me so. All creation is like this; it is a jumping-off into the void.’
Would you not say so, Henré?”

Her singling me out startled me. I had been on the
periphery of this discussion, preoccupied with the ship’s telemetry being fed
to me and the bits of news and gossip Enid was plucking out of the planet’s
grid. But I still managed not to let too many moments go by before looking up
at her.

“It is,” I said, “and you can’t always help it.
And even if you could—” I gestured at the curves of the cabins and couches
around us. “When I was putting this thing together, there was a part of me that
didn’t want a final plan, just a starting point. However it comes together,
whatever it looks like when it does—that’s not going to be for me to decide. At
least, not as long as what matters most is just getting us away from an
exploding star.”

Somewhere above the mountain pass, outside and above
the train of the
Vajra III,
the thumping of thunder came distantly to
our ears. Angharad’s smile was now a lot closer to what it had been so many
times before.

“All I have are the failed examples of before to
serve as my guides,” she said. “Even, and especially, the failure of the very
way that brought me here in the first place. What I want is not the Old Way,
not the High End, not Continuum either—nothing against you, of course, Ioné—”

Ioné smiled. “I’d only ask that you see Continuum
for yourself first.”

“Of course; that is a given. Still: my original
statement stands. What comes next cannot be any one of those things. It might
well have the seeds of any one of them, or all of them, within it. But it will
be no more
them
than the father is the son.” She gave vent to a sigh. “To
have an actual child would be far easier, would it not?”

“I think my dad would have disagreed,” I said. And
maybe hers, too.

It’s not as if Continuum
is the only
planet out there with not a single landmark to be seen from orbit. Any number
of moons, gas giants, or just-plain-uninhabitables are every bit as blank. The
difference is that Continuum didn’t come that way.

It took generations of work on Continuum to level
things out, fill them in, cover every rocky meter with a crust of substrate
that went down for kilometers and was automatically replenished from within.
That polish job had been part of the first- and second-generation mission for
the Continuum pioneers: create a planet-sized environment where every single
physical attribute could be locked down and controlled, where the surface
albedo could be tuned to within a thousandth of a percent or the large-scale
seismic behavior of the planet’s crust could be rechanneled. In theory, they
could have built that environment from scratch, using a spaceborne structure,
but a) that would have taken far longer and b) they already had a planet to
work with—and c) even Continuum wasn’t immune to feeling the pride that goes
with
taming
something that exists.

Talk had begun to license those techniques out to
other IPS worlds that wanted and needed them, and could use them to give
badly-needed boosts to their backed-up terraforming schedules. Only three things
stood in the way: Continuum’s gentle but unyielding reticence about, well,
everything; the sheer scale and scope required to implement and refine such
work; and a few very loud voices of objection over how such techniques could be
easily weaponized. The comeback to that last argument, and the one that was
slowly winning, was a familiar one:
Name one invented thing that has
not
been weaponized anyway.

Let the sight of Continuum’s surface fill your
vision during the approach, and after only a few moments it feels as if you’re
not descending at all anymore, simply because there wasn’t anything to
see.
The only things that registered to the naked eye were minute changes in the
quality of the light around us as we dropped through the atmosphere, and the
tiniest off-white square centered dead below us. That was our landing pad,
which like everything else we would experience in our time there had been
custom-instantiated for us.

“I feel like I’m staring into a bowl of milk.”
Enid blinked, crossing and uncrossing her eyes.

“A few kilometers more,” Ioné said, “and you will
be able to start making out the substrate maintenance stations. The surface
actually isn’t featureless.”

“From this far up, it does a fine job of faking
it,” Cioran said.

A minute later, I saw what Ioné meant. A hexagonal
dot pattern, wrapping the surface in all directions, started to emerge from the
white like the shadows of objects after high noon. Between the dots, even more
gradually, emerged faint lines of current or maybe interference patterns. It took
some staring to realize those lines were in motion—that they were the edges of spirals
endlessly unwrapping themselves into their neighbors. At the spot where we were
descending to, the spiral pattern became first a deepening dimple and then a
chasm, widening at the edges as much as it needed to admit the whole of the
ship.

Continuum had decided that the
Vajra III
needed to be parked below, both to maintain their own rules about the planet’s
surface, and to provide that much more protection for the thousands of us in
the ship. There was no actual atmosphere up-top anyway—well, nothing
we
could breathe—and so since Continuum had to instantiate an environment for us
in the first place, and had no limits on their materials budget to speak of,
they were will within their rights to create a spherical underground cavern
several kilometers on a side to hold the ship and all who rode with it. The
inside walls of that cavern were flooded with the kind of light I would have
only expected to see courtesy of a real sun beating down on us.

The universe’s biggest protomic sandbox, I
thought. And there’s a good chance I might get to play with it.

Our seat gyros swayed as the looped mesh of beads
that made up the
Vajra III
came to rest in the bottom of that space. The
mesh creaked and compressed slightly—we could feel the shock of touchdown
eddying back and forth through the ship, like waves rebounding off the walls of
a pool—but the rocking stopped as the engines all provided just enough
repulsion to turn the whole structure rigid. Above us, the portal to the
surface pinched shut. Several thousand people, myself included, burst into
applause.

“It’s not as if we’re the first outsiders to ever
touch down here,” I said to Ioné, “but it sure does feel like it.”

I granted Ioné privileges to patch into the
shipwide general CL and broadcast a few words to everyone about what to expect.
As with our landing on Omn Leva (she explained), the ship would need to be
disassembled as part of the disembarkation procedure. However, due to the
docking space we’d been provided, the process wouldn’t take anywhere nearly as
long. Rather than unwind the whole ball or detach the modules, the spaces
between each layer of winding would simply be widened slightly, and exit
passages automatically extruded and woven between them. No more
first-in-last-out problems. I made a note to myself to build something like
that into the next iteration of whatever this was going to be, if there
was
a next iteration.

I glanced sidelong at Kallhander. He had been
watching Ioné during the whole descent, and he still had his eyes on her now as
she described for all of us the docking and disembarkation process. It was a
milder version of the kind of rapt attention you saw people directing at
Angharad whenever she spoke. He’d always worked hard at being difficult to
read, but now that he’d seemingly let down his guard, it just made him even
more inscrutable.

Now that she’s only his partner in name, I
thought, what does that make the two of them? Co-collaborators? I suspected
even they wouldn’t be able to tell me—that it was something they could only put
a name to when they looked back over their shoulders at it.

I got the go-ahead to expand the interstitial mesh
of the ship, as dozens of skinny little hexagonal fingers reached out from the
walls of the docking chamber and began to lace themselves through the structure
of the
Vajra III
. Everyone had already freed themselves from their seats
and was bustling about. Enid was doing pull-ups from a doorway cross-beam,
pointing her toes sharply down as she lifted and lowered; Angharad and Ulli
were looking out a side view-panel at the newly-formed access tunnel preparing
to connect with the core module. Below and above and around us, thousands of
others stretched, embraced, yawned, undid compartments, and waited for their
turn to walk free. I could have let the sensory surface feeds from each of
their compartments surround me, as if I was peering through a thousand walls at
once, but I let my imagination do the work instead. If you’re all wondering if
this is going to be home for you, I thought, so am I.

Kallhander was first at the door when the
permission-to-come-aboard signal came through, with Ioné following just a
moment after. The spring in their step vanished before they were halfway through
the doorway; they then stopped, stepped back, and let me through first instead.
I saw Ioné’s hand reach unthinkingly for her now-blank sleeve as I walked past,
and seeing that made it all clear for me: they were still too used to being the
first ones to put themselves in the line of fire. Now, with nothing to fire
back with—at least not officially—they were simply passengers themselves.

I stepped into the embarkation area, sealed it
behind me, and for a moment puzzled over the CL ident of whoever was standing
on the other side. It’s not that the ident was nonsensical, only that I’d never
seen one formatted for a Continuum instance before. (No, Ioné didn’t count; her
ident was officially IPS.) Apart from the name (“Eotvo”) and her affiliation
(“Central Heuristics”), the sheer number of fields coming up as “N/A” made me
not want to unseal the outside hatch. I told myself to get used to it. If half
of what Ioné had hinted to me in the past was true, I’d be seeing things an
order of magnitude weirder before the day was out.

This is what I saw of Eotvo through the outside
sensory surfaces, right before I popped the hatch: take Ioné, add Cioran’s
height and maybe some of Ulli’s imperiousness, add some indeterminacy of
gender, and wrap her in a close-fitting outfit that trailed raiments from the
shoulders and seemed as far removed from Continuum’s sterility as a rose
blooming on an iceberg. She was alone—no guards, no retinue—but then again, in
a place like Continuum, who needed them?

“Welcome, Mister Sim,” said Eotvo. “I’ve been
assigned to your group as a liaison.”

Handshake, bow, or salute? I wondered. Eotvo saved
me the trouble of deciding and simply gave me a bow in the form of a deep nod.
Probably because of Angharad being with us, I thought.

“Glad to have you with us,” I said, nod-bowing in
return. “So you’ll also be overseeing coordination with the refugees
themselves?”

“There’ll be other instances of my template
that’ll be available for everyone as needed. So, in a manner of speaking, yes.
But any questions or needs from you or your group can be directed through me.
May I say hello to the Kathaya as well?”

“I know she’ll want to return the favor.” I sent
out an invite for her to join us in the vestibule.

“Ioné was to provide us with detailed information about
your group based on her own observations, to make our job easier. She thought
it best to have you officially welcomed by us first, and then have you sign off
on the details she would forward.”

“It’s appreciated. I guess her time in IPS has drilled
those kinds of habits into her.”

“Actually, they’re habits garnered from her
original template programming. But it seems her time in IPS has refined them
further.”

Each
us
and
her
and
she
(and
I,
whenever Eotvo spoke it) leapt out at me. I knew full well all of those
pronouns were nothing but objects of convenience Continuum had adopted over
time for the sake of everything that was not Continuum. For Continuum there was
neither “I” nor even “we”, but a river of “I” that flowed into an ocean of “we”
and then back again. Through Ioné, I’d only seen all that second-hand; here, I
could experience its original incarnation.

On seeing Angharad enter the vestibule from the
rear, Eotvo performed a bow nearly deep enough to count as a genuflection. Angharad
returned the bow, every bit as deeply, while over her shoulder Ioné and Eotvo
exchanged a passing nod. Something like that nod, I thought, isn’t for their
own sake. That’s to make
us
feel a little less like Continuum is one big
self.

“On behalf of all who are here,” Angharad said,
“let me offer our thanks.”

“We’re only too happy to help.” Eotvo stepped back
slightly to allow everyone to step out into the access tunnel. “After all, this
comes at a moment just when Continuum was looking for a new way to demonstrate
our intentions to the rest of the universe. Since we’re in a unique position to
aid you without the burdens other worlds seem to face—”

“Especially when those ‘burdens’ are all in the
head!” Cioran said as he stepped forward in turn, from behind Ioné. “That’s the
one resource you’re going to find is more exhaustible than any other:
expectations
!”

“So we’ve noticed.”

The mesh of access
tunnels that laced
through the
Vajra III
, like so many flexible knitting needles pushed
through a loose ball of yarn, converged after a fashion into a single series of
parallel tunnels: threads woven into a flat ribbon. You could look to either
side through the tunnel walls and see all of your fellow emigrants following
along—and see their faces to be all uniformly drained and passive. There was
barely a hand that wasn’t ensconced in someone else’s, and I had to wonder how
many of those pairs were originally strangers who’d reached for the nearest
human being just to feel someone was close by.

On the other side of the parallel tunnel out of the
docking chamber was another space that must have been several kilometers on its
longest side, several hundred meters deep, and also brilliant with
hexagonally-allocated points of light all along its inside walls. All substrate,
I thought, like everything else here. Realizing what it was gave me enough of a
jolt that I spoke my guess out loud.

“It’s like the convenience suite in Xiovan
Towers,” I said. “A giant protomic playground—only this one’s the size of a
city
.”
It was all I could do to keep from fidgeting with glee.

“’Playground’ wasn’t the term we had in mind,”
Eotvo said. “’Workshop’, or perhaps ‘homestead’, would be closer to the truth.”
She turned to Angharad, lowering her head slightly. “This is your space—for you
and all who’ve followed you here. Yours to mold as you see fit. You have among
you, I take it, designers or architects?”

“Yes, yes we do,” Angharad said, only
half-listening. She stepped to the railing that skirted the lip along the wall
where we stood and stuck her head out as far as she dared. Enid hoisted herself
up on the railing and did the same. Eotvo seemed ready to walk up and pull her
back down, but after seeing no one else complain—and seeing Angharad curl one
arm protectively around Enid’s leg without even looking—she stepped back
offered us a smile instead.

It didn’t feel like we were in an enclosed
space—more like a plot of land as seen at night. There was a slight breeze
blowing through, a fresh one even, and it somehow carried with it the scents of
life that I would never have imagined could be found here.