Flight of the Vajra (100 page)

“You’re worried if people see her as just that, a person—that
she won’t have the same power as before. The power she has only because other
people give it to her. Is that right?”

“Does she
have
any other kind of power,
Henré?”

This time, I took her shoulders; this time, I
looked her right in the eyes.

“When she sat us down in her study and told us
where all this was going,” I said, “you know what I thought? That something
like this was inevitable. She doesn’t
want
the kind of power she used to
have. Why else would she be looking to get rid of it, to trade up on it for
something a little more, what was the word you just said?
Human
? Don’t
you think she knows that people are going to throw mud at her if they want to,
and that they don’t need any one excuse to do it? —Look, I’m not saying you’re
stupid or that you’re worrying about nothing. But we’re all in something very
different from what we started off with.” I took her hand again. “I’m swearing
to you right now that I’m not going to let any of this fall apart. Not because
of me, or her, or even you. You hear me?”

“Five by five, boss.”

We were both smiling, if only raggedly, by the
time she said that. I then gave her the hug I’d been saving up the whole time.

“Now let me get the rest of this
soap
out
of my face,” she said, “and then get you up to speed!”

I saved her some time by skimming the news from
hither and yon. It felt strange to see firsthand evidence Continuum had a
jumpnet node same as most every other world, but all the public feeds were indeed
there, unedited. All were agog about how Bridgehead and its attendant sun were
now nothing more than a hazy aura of rapidly expanding superheated gas.
Everyone in the immediate stellar vicinity—that is, anyone for a hundred
light-years in all directions, us included—was thanking their lucky stars, pun
intended, that Bridgehead Sol wasn’t massive enough to poison the whole stellar
neighborhood with X and gamma radiation in a full-blown nova. And even if it
had
been, opined more than one egghead, we’d have plenty of time to do something
about it, wouldn’t we? Sure, unless the next sun to be touched off like so many
dry leaves did in fact happen to be that massive, and nobody liked admitting
the one big strategy humanity had long kept in reserve for such stellar
catastrophes—emigration—was now choked to a standstill.Mixed in with all that
was some auxiliary grousing about how Continuum was suddenly allowing what
amounted to full-time guests, and why couldn’t anyone else get a piece of that
action?

I decided it’d be worth our wile to take some time
later in the day and offer our own rebuttal. Plus, we needed at some point to
do a sit-down with the local IPS presence, who were no doubt jealous to death
of us for being allowed to experience Continuum directly instead of having to honor
their side of the treaty by holing up in their little redoubt and dealing with
the rest of the planet through triply-sanitized proxies.

And
everyone
wanted an interview, but cosm
take that for now.

I took a break from it all to ascend the stairs
that ran along part of the inside wall of the common room. On the roof I paused
for a moment at the railing, inhaled the inexplicably fresh air, and looked out
over the city that had just been built. Already I saw houses here and there
with new colors, splashes of exotic petals and fronds that must have been the
product of custom instantiation in Continuum’s greenhouses. The comfortable but
bland shell Caleba had enclosed us in was already being pecked through, and a
place where people
lived
instead of just parking their bodies was
emerging.

Something was different about the eastern horizon.
No, it wasn’t just my eyes: the CL map for the city was different, too. The far
eastern wall I had been staring out towards—the one opposite from the wall that
divided us off from where the
Vajra III
was garaged—had been pushed back
a ways, and in its place was a carpet of green many meters tall. A forest, I
thought; not a manicured little park, but an honest-to-cosm
forest
.
Divided off from the houses and streets with a retractable fenceline, but a
forest all the same. Annotations on the map told me the greenery had been added
at Caleba’s behest after she’d taken some feedback from the residents. (Not
“refugees”; not anymore.)

I felt something land on my face—a fly—reached up
to brush it away, then thought better of it and let it buzz off of its own
accord. It was a neighbor here, too.

“Oh,
there
you are!” Ulli called up from
behind me. “I haven’t had my CL on all morning. I’ve been wandering about, saying
hello.”

“Campaigning for a seat?” I said.

“Reminding everyone I held one, more like,” she
said. “It’s been fruitful. I imagine it’ll give me a bit of a lead when we
finally do have those community elections Continuum harped on about.”

“If I didn’t already have a position of
responsibility, I’d be out there knocking on doors too.”

“Would you!”

“Oh, yes. But apart from me already having my
hands full, you’ve got a built-in advantage in that respect. These people
actually
know
you from something other than a headline.”

“They know you
now
, Henré! You told me
yourself when you walked about during our stopover at Omn Leva, how well they received
you. You can’t be at that great a disadvantage.”

“Eh, there’s other reasons. I keep thinking, I do
my best work when I’m out of the public eye. The more I think about being out
in front, the less I think about what I can do there and more about what
everyone else might see. But I also know it wasn’t always like that.” Not in
the pre-
Kyritan
days, that was for sure.

“Then don’t hold yourself hostage like that, I
say. Out with you. Go press some flesh!” She swept a hand out over the city.

“Even if it means competing with you?”

“Especially if it means competing with me! It’ll
give you something new to do.”

“True. But, see, maybe it came out wrong when I
said I had my hands full.” I looked back up at the ceiling-sky—whatever the
kids of our kids would call it—and couldn’t see anything that made it only a
glorified sunroof. It was much a sky as any I’d seen. “I
like
having my
hands full with Angharad. My hands have been empty for too long. Having her
come along reminded me of how having them full was the whole point. Plus, from
everything I’ve seen, she needs other people around her that aren’t necessarily
going to say yes to her. She needs people who can say both yes
and
no to
her. And sometimes say ‘I don’t know’, too.” I shaded my eyes. “Of all the jobs
I’ve had in my life, this is the one where I felt like I’ve actually
accomplished
something.”

“So there were no ‘accomplishments’ in your
previous career? None at all?”

“Nothing like this.”

I didn’t have to point at any one thing to give my
“this” a referent. She knew it meant everything now around us.

“Henré!” Angharad, still ensconced in her study,
called out to me over CL. “I have just been contacted by the IPS outpost
station here on Continuum. They have been debriefing our officers, but they
also have received an official petition from someone seeking political asylum
with us. Officially it would be Continuum that would be providing asylum, but
that would be transferred to our provision once official diplomatic recognition
is established.”

That reminded me, I thought: what were we going to
call this little enclave of ours, anyway? “Who’s the refugee?” I said.

“Aram Dezaki,” she said, which explained completely why
she had sounded so puzzled.

“Just start from the top,”
I said, as
evenly as I could, “and don’t leave anything out. Don’t worry about me getting
bored with details. Details are
never
boring.”

Angharad and I sat side-by-side in the half of her
study that sported floor cushions and a niche for statuary and flower
arrangements. The other half was taken up by a CL-space rendering of a
high-security conference room somewhere in the IPS satellite office on the
other side of the planet: walls featureless except for a grid pattern of
sensors and extrusion points; a table; three chairs. On the left, a lean-faced
and -bodied officer named MacHanichy; on the right, a broad-shouldered and blunt-necked
fellow CL-tagged as Wadala.

Seated between them was Aram Dezaki, no longer
missing the lower half of his body. The chair he was in was more like a sealed
clamshell-style enclosure in the shape of a man sitting down. It encased him
entirely, with only his head free.

“Dezaki actually made his first appeals for asylum
right after we took him into custody and completed his reconstruction,”
MacHanichy said. He sounded like a parent giving bad news to a spouse about an
unruly child. “We didn’t take him seriously, as you can imagine. He continued
to insist, so I was obliged to add it to my interrogation reports. That’s when
Wadala here got involved.”

“From what I saw, we couldn’t completely dismiss
this as frivolous,” Wadala said. His CL tags told me he was Dezaki’s IPS-appointed
counsel, and he talked more like a college professor who suddenly had an eager
audience for his esoterica. “It’s the obligation of IPS to heed calls for
asylum like this whenever they’re made, but his status as a legal entity was the
most questionable part. Technically, he’s property. He’s a piece of evidence.”

“I remember that much about the discussion,” I
said. “I said as much myself about him.”

“I made them a deal,” Aram said. “If they gave me
asylum here, with you, I could provide them with active details about a lot of
things they couldn’t get from some scrape. They were certain that between
Arsèni and I, we knew more about Marius’s plans than anyone else. But they gave
up Arsèni to save their necks, and scrape or no scrape, they certainly don’t
want to lose me.”

“So how exactly does this work?” I said. “He stays
here with us, just under your guard?”

“That’s about the sum of it,” MacHanichy said.
“House arrest, if you want to call it that.”

“If it is his cooperation you seek,” Angharad
said, “I imagine he will be far more cooperative knowing he is under the guard
of others we ourselves trust.”

“Oh,
no
.” The lines in MacHanichy’s face
yanked in even tighter. “If you’re talking about the two who were assigned to
you as oversight and liaison, forget it. Kallhander and
especially
Ioné
are on desk probation. They get no such duties. It’s us or nobody.”

“This hardly counts as asylum, then,” Angharad
said. “He has no freedom of movement; he is still technically a non-entity—”

“He’s got freedom of communication with your
group,” Wadala said. “Given all the latitude that provides him, isn’t that
enough?”

“I’m satisfied with it myself,” Aram said. “After
all, I’m giving them access to the one man in the whole universe they want most
right now. Me being able to talk to you is a small price for them to pay.”

Enid had brought me further up to speed about the
Marius situation right before the conference. Communications with Rollain had in
fact been completely severed, and the IPS detachment that had been sent to
investigate hadn’t reported back in. The administrator of the network routing
controls that served Rollain and its neighbors noted that before Rollain had
its first outbound traffic outage, there had been some other minor
interruptions beforehand—all of which to his eye was evidence of tampering, and
not just a flaky link. Meaning Marius might well have been ensconced in there
and setting up shop long before anyone else had realized . . . and
even the IPS was at a loss as to how to get a foot in the door.

Aram’s handlers signed off not long after
that—“Lucky for you, you already know what you’re getting into with him,”
MacHanichy grumbled—and as they melted out of view, so did Aram’s restraints. His
CL image stood up and crossed over into “our” side of the room, his eyes not on
us but the view of the city outside.

“Nicely done in such a short timespan,” he said.

“Thank the architects, and the residents, and
Continuum’s massively-parallel manufacturing,” I said. “We just helped them put
the pieces together.”

 “Aram,” Angharad said, in her quietest voice
since we had landed, “what is it that you want?”

That turned Aram’s outward attention away from the
window, although there was nothing that said he wasn’t also having his fill of
sights from every public surface in the city. But the eyes of his CL image were
on us, and they stayed specifically on Angharad as he closed the distance
between her and then knelt on the empty cushion in front of her.

“I want you to teach me how to die,” he said.

An earlier version of me would have had a whole
arsenal of snide comments at the ready.
You can find someone to save you the
trouble;
or maybe
What’s to learn?
But my mouth remained closed and
my ears open.

Angharad was prim. “Are you ill?”

“No. On the contrary, I’m far too healthy for my
own good. Henré knows this; he’s shown you by now how it is exceedingly
difficult for me to die at all. Any one instance of me might die, but ‘I’
remain scattered about, waiting for a chance to pick up where the last of me
left off. I was proud of that design when I created it. I still am proud of it.
It’s an engineering marvel, if I dare say so. All the best of Continuum and the
Highend combined. And look what it’s been used for. Silly insurrections, petty
uprisings . . . a boy’s vengeance against his own mother, of all
things! Marius had any number of other instances of me at his
command—uninstantiated at the time, but if he’s shacked up on that terraform
site with even more substrate at his beck and call than you can find here, you
can bet he’s going to use it to continue me.”

“I thought that was what you wanted,” I said. “To
be continued, courtesy of others.”

“Oh, it
was.
That’s the problem. It all
looked so much better from the outside.”

“Most dreams do. —So why the about-face?”

“Pragmatism. I don’t relish the thought of being
incinerated any more than you do, and I doubt Marius is going to do me any
special favors now that I’ve essentially turned state’s evidence against him.”

“Wait, wait. I thought you said you
wanted
to die.”

“Don’t understand me too quickly, Henré. I said I
wanted to be
taught how to die
. Death itself—that’s another story. I
want to learn from the master here—” He nodded towards Angharad. “—about the
business of preparing for death, however it may come. You see . . . ”
He looked down and let a mordant giggle fall into his own lap. “
. . . what’s the fun in never having the chance of being truly
re-
born?
Not just as an instance or an incarnation of the same basic template. I’ve had
that so many times now. And this whole experience taught me something I never
imagined it would be necessary to learn. It taught me why the Highend worlds
have the suicide rates they do, and why they never, ever talk about it.
Anything is better than admitting they have simply created perfect machines,
the size of a whole society—and sometimes no more than a society of one—for
doing the same thing forever and pretending it’s somehow better. Better than
what, exactly?”

“In other words,” I said, “you’re bored of being
you.”

“I shouldn’t have expected sympathy from you, but
that’s why I came to
her
.”

“Bored with allowing spoiled brats to ruin the
infrastructure of whole planets. Bored even with slaughtering thousands of
people in a go, by exploiting engineering oversights.”

“Henré.” Angharad put her hand on my arm.

“The only reason I’m not smashing your head in,” I
went on, “is because, one, you’re not actually
in
this room—”

“Henré.”

“—and two, I know it wouldn’t really stop you. But
if you want to die for real, I’m
happy
to help.”

“Henré, sit
down
.”

Never in my whole life had I felt I was in more
trouble than when she spoke those two words.

“I never doubted for a second,” Aram said, “that Henré
here wanted me to have one collective neck so he could break it. I’d give him
the satisfaction if I thought for a second it would make the slightest
difference. But I know it won’t. I suspect he knows that too.”

I finally let my knees go weak enough to force me
to sit. Angharad kept her hand on my arm, as if ready to drag me back in at any
second.

“You ought to know,” Aram went on, “that it isn’t
difficult to have all my repositories hunted down and erased. Without those,
all of my instances are just so many husks. You know this and the IPS knows
this too, which is why they want me on some kind of leash. —But all of that
would just have been preparation for me learning how to use this instance I
have now—the
only
instance I would ever have from now on—for something
truly
new. And throughout the whole of this universe, I can’t think of a single other
who would be better suited to the job than her.” He shook his head at me. “Is
it not enough for me to offer you the chance to have me dead in the most
profound way possible? Is that not enough for you? Evidently it isn’t.”

He was on the verge of saying more, but Angharad
held up her hand. It stopped him from going on, and kept me from getting myself
into any more trouble.

“I will teach you what you wish to know,” Angharad
said, “but I promise nothing, of course, as far as the results. All I promise
is the teaching itself. There are some duties that we must all attend to
shortly—” That would be the appointment of the community reps; my mind was a
million miles from that now (kilometers for precision; miles for poetry, I thought).
“—but return to me in the afternoon and we will begin.”

“I’ll be happy to.” He stood up and stepped
towards the window, and I thought: He enjoys that view, too. But there’s no way
he enjoys it for the same reasons I do. That’s now my
home
out there.

It was only after his projection had vanished
downstairs (a cue he was out of “earshot”) that I turned to Angharad and said, “How
come you didn’t just throw me out? I sure deserved it after mouthing off like
that.”

“You were better served hearing his words
yourself. I am far from being the only person who would ever have something to
teach you.”

“You really think he’s not just being facetious?”

“If all this is a lie, it will hurt him worse than
it hurts us. Besides, judging from his words, I might have less to teach him
than he thinks.”

One look at Angharad’s face and I could see how
everything I radiated then was hurting her.

“What you want from him will be impossible for
anyone to give you, least of all him,” she went on. “If you wish for revenge,
or justice, or anything by those names, you must ask yourself why. Wanting
those things on impossible terms is worse than never asking for them at all. —Why
revenge, exactly? Do you want revenge so that others will say of you, ‘He did
not let all those who died go unavenged’? Then it is not revenge for them; it
is for yourself.”

“Who doesn’t want something like that for
themselves?” I felt the dismay on my face melt a bit, but not enough.

“You are quite right. There is no one who does not
have such feelings, myself included. Revenge for Mimu and Wani, for instance—do
you think no such thoughts, no such wanting, ever took up residence in me after
they were killed? Do you believe I am immune from wanting to see Marius
punished for all he has done? No; I want those things, too. But I also
understand to have them comes at a cost to me that can never be fully repaid.”

She took hold of my hand again, and held it long
enough without speaking that the act alone seemed to be a sentence unto itself.

“We should prepare for the appointment
roundtable,” she said. “Let us not lose our momentum.”

I nodded. “I might be campaigning for a seat
myself.”

“Oh? Which one?”

“Depends on what Continuum is asking for and what
we actually come up with. Building the
Vajra III
or running the city’s
infrastructure only feels like half a job. There’s more I could be doing
. . . directly, face-to-face. —I haven’t thought about this as much
as I wanted to, what with everything else going on.”

“I will think no less of you if you simply want to
make sure everything remains plugged in and turned on. No good work is ever
wasted.”

I let her touch my hand again before we connected
with the conference center and the walls of the room melted away again.

I didn’t stay put, though.
I had too
much of the restless energy I always get after something emotional. My body
always thinks every problem it meets can be fled from—even when the problem’s
actually nowhere but in my head, and my head knows that. But out I went,
keeping the conference link in the background. Just over the nearest bridge was
a small park—an empty lot of grass, really—where the adjoining residents were
slowly building a curious contraption that looked like a zigzag child’s slide.
Only when the water was turned on did I realize it was an endless waterfall,
where the water that rained into the bottom was siphoned back up to the top
again. In the bottom of the pool, at the foot of the slide, glittered a single
yellow coin of a size and denomination I recognized immediately.