Flight of the Vajra (101 page)

From Enid, I thought. For good luck.

Organizing a meeting with thousands of people in
attendance is never easy, even in CL-space, but Angharad and Eotvo kept the
noise and interruptions to a minimum. Twenty minutes for introduction and
explanation: Angharad was going to appoint, from volunteers in the population,
folks to serve as community liaisons with Continuum for specific matters. Ten
minutes to break out and identify the various positions. Half an hour for
interested parties (who’d been putting together their pitches since yesterday) to
stump for the various offices. A quick rundown of the applicants for the
audience’s sake, and then the meeting would adjourn until the selections were
announced.

The candidates were ours to provide, but
Continuum’s to choose. Angharad had only one vote to select a candidate, while Continuum
had two—albeit from separate heuristics departments, one wired to favor
Continuum’s interests and another wired to favor our own. Those appointed would
provisionally serve their appointment for three solar months; if there were no
major objections, they’d get an extended tour of duty, length t.b.d. New
position appointments would be held regularly, period t.b.d.

It was all straight out of Community Planning 201
and the Rules of Order. Angharad even wielded a gavel, although she didn’t need
to tap it more than once to get everyone’s attention.

Most of the folks in that audience were old hands
at juggling CL tasks and real-world actions. They mused over all this while
stretched out on their rooftops, or swimming up the length of one of the
newly-built pools I spotted at a distance with bare eyes, or—like me—just
standing somewhere and savoring the cross-breeze and the sunlight channeled
from above and outside. “Director of Infrastructure” sounded like a shoo-in for
me, if I chose to ask for it. Maybe I could even clean up the bad taste Mylène
and Marius had left in everyone’s mouth, mine included, with that title. None
of us in the core group even had official titles or positions yet, so for Cioran
to lobby for “Director of Cultural Affairs” (I could hear him say it now: “Yes,
but what
kinds
of affairs?”), or for Ulli to get into the running for
“Director of Mediations” didn’t seem like redundancy. If nothing else, we
always had a place next to Angharad in some form. (“And if I lose out,” Ulli
said to me sidelong, “I won’t really have lost anything. I’ll still be
here
.”)

I put in my bid for Director of Infrastructure and
took another walk. My record, I claimed, spoke for itself.

Two lots over from the fountain, I found Enid. She
and about six other kids her age were booting a ball across a field they’d
allocated and outfitted with foul lines and goal nets. The grass was still damp
enough that one good kick at the ball from Enid sent her sprawling and sliding.
I gave her a hand back up.

“Grow some cleats!” I told her. “That footwear’s
too flat for this.”

“I only now found that out!” She laughed and wiped
the dew and crushed leaves off the backs of her thighs. “I thought I could get
away with just having good balance. —I’m waiting for Kallhander to come back
from his debriefing; he said he’d have some notes for us on his end vis-à-vis
having Aram here. And I know you
really
don’t like having him around,
but—”

“Enid, are you in or out!?” the goalie, a girl,
hollered at her.

“I’m out!” Enid hollered back.

I leaned to one side to peek at the goalie, now
running back to join her friends at the penalty spot. “How old is she?” I asked
Enid. (Everyone’s CL was turned off, ostensibly to even out the game; hence
their shouting and my question.)

“Fifteen,” Enid said.

I felt a quiet nudge of surprise. The last time I
could readily remember seeing someone that young was back on Cytheria—the
gaggle of kids chasing Enid around in their game of capture-her-flags. Well, Marius
hadn’t been much older, biologically, but to fire and cosmos with him.

“I’m . . . learning not to hate Aram,” I
said, getting back on track. “I have a couple of very good teachers in that
respect.”

“Besides, he’s got the keys to Marius’s kingdom,
just about, doesn’t he? That’s reason enough to be his best buddy for life.”

“Or at least not shove him away. I just know that
I can’t lie about what I feel. I look at him and all I see is the faces of
people who shouldn’t be dead if only because of him.” I started walking away
from the field, Enid falling into step next to me. “You had the same thing for
a long time yourself, didn’t you? Whenever you looked at Angharad and all you
could see was—”

“—was Dad. Yeah. And now, I look at her, and all I
see is
her
. It’s because she’s an actual
person
to me now. Not
just a face on a poster. I still think she’s the only one Dad’ll listen to, but
that’s
him
, not her.”

“What did it take for you to come to that?”

“All that time we spent with her, I guess. You saw
what happened during that whole trip from Kathayagara to Bridgehead. At first
all I could think about was how to get a rise out of her. That’d be a great
shingle to hang out next to my name, wouldn’t it? ‘The Girl who Pissed Off the
Kathaya.’
 
”

“And then things changed.”

“Did they ever!”

She would have gone on in that vein, but I got
back on track: “There’s only one problem. Aram is most definitely not the
Kathaya. I doubt I’m going to have the same experiences while in his company.”
Even as I said those words, the fact they constituted a lame dodge of the real
issue presented itself. “But the point isn’t to be his friend, is it? It’s to
get what we need from him, and let him get what he needs from us. That’s all.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you sounded
kinda let down by that.”

I’d been about to say,
It would be nice if he
wasn’t the person he was,
but those words sounded absurd to my own ears even
without me speaking them aloud. I looked up and around at the place we’d built,
and I thought: Is that the kind of delusion that comes to people like me? You spend
so much time changing things, and so casually too, that when you finally run
into something you can’t change you have no idea what to do next.

“I was,” I said at last. “At first.”

I’d hit a dead end. She sensed, correctly, a topic
change was in order. “You put in your votes yet?”

“Already done. You?”

“I did that just now myself. I’m not running for
any office—well, not directly. I thought I’d just stay as your right hand, so
to speak, for whatever it is you’re doing. I mean, I
am
good at that,
yeah?”

“And getting better every day.”

Her glee didn’t last long, though. In the next
second, she hugged her shoulders and frowned at the pavement now under our
feet. “Maybe this is going to sound weird, but . . . ”

“Go on, Enid.”

“Don’t you think there’s something—how do I say
it—
wrong
about making all these rules and electing all these people
right now? You said yourself, what with Marius still out there, there’s a
chance we could all be boiled away right where we’re standing.”

“When is it ever
not
like that?”

“I know, I know! But even more so now. That’s the
consensus, anyway—that whatever happened was no accident, and that until we
find out why and how, everyone’s at risk.”

“And yet here
you
are, kicking a ball
around with your new neighbors.” That looked like it stung her worse than it
had to, so I softened my approach. “You’re not doing anything wrong, at least
not in my eyes. You’re trying to make the best of living in a universe that
only allows us to live by accident. We all find a different way to cope with
that. And sometimes we do more than just cope.” I stood in front of her to stop
her; she looked up at me. “Don’t feel guilty now because you dared to take a
few minutes between things to breathe some air and kick a ball around. Okay? None
of this falls on the shoulders of any one person. That’s the mistake I keep
making.” None of it was coming out the way I wanted. Every time I reached for
the words, I came back with only half of what I’d tried to seize.

But from the way Enid nodded and squeezed my hand,
it seemed to be the right half.

“Still, I should get back to work,” she said. “Kallhander’s
back out from his debriefing, and you need to talk to Aram, from the sound of
it.”

“Whether or not I like it,” I said. I gave her hair
a quick tousle—she reached up and knocked off my hat to do the same—and with
that she ran back off towards our house.

I wanted to wander
some more—besides,
it hardly mattered where physically I had my little soiree with Aram—and so
continued across into the next lot. There, someone had programmed a low fence
and had carved some furrows for the overturned soil. In the adjoining lot, the
squared-off bulk of a newly-instantiated manufaxture was busy fabbing away some
single-rider vehicle with knobby, mutable wheels. The sight of all that wasn’t
enough to push Enid’s words out of my mind, about how our world-within-a-world was
nothing more than a thin little plate balanced on top of the most precarious of
needles. One jostle from below, or a few too many imbalances on top, and down
we’d all go. But here we are, living anyway.

I found Aram in the doorway of a two-story house
whose ground floor had already been cleared and repurposed for commercial use
as a restaurant and bar. Golden lights all around the outside; glow-strips
along the floor on the inside; bar, pool table, and mutable multipurpose
tabletops all around; a dozen good smells wafting out the door and through the
little side window, where people could stick their heads in for orders-to-go
served in four-square-folded brown paper. Odds were a place like this would
need to be licensed and regulated, but for now it was one of a thousand other
flowers blooming.

Why Aram was in such a place, I couldn’t imagine:
it wasn’t like his projection could taste anything unless someone else granted
him a direct connection, and that was expressly disallowed on his end.

“I came to apologize, if you want to hear it,” I
said, for his ears only.

He had been turned away, facing the little garden
along the side of the building, from which climbing vines spread to cover an
entire wall and part of the roof, too. Maybe, like me, he was admiring the way
so much greenery had been instantiated in such a short amount of time. The mere
fact of that was starting to make me wonder if massively parallel instantiation
alone was responsible for such a thing.

“You don’t sound too abashed,” he said, still
looking away, “but I’ll assume you’re sincere. Angharad told me you ‘mean
well’, which is one of the many ways we excuse our friends to others.”

You’re not helping, I wanted to say, but I kept
that and a load of much harsher stuff to myself. “How much have you told IPS so
far?” I said.

“About Marius and his plans? Enough to get them
curious. The fact I also know what he was up to with that engine module was a
good bargaining chip. I told them enough supporting details to make them take
seriously my earlier request for asylum. They gave me enough freedom to satisfy
me for the time being, but I’m still supposed to tell them everything in short
order.”

“What happens if you try to tell one of us?”

“They wouldn’t like that. They would probably pull
my plug the second I started talking about it. And from what I understand, your
inside connection to the wonderful world of the IPS was cut off not long ago. I
personally don’t see why they’re trying to keep such a tight lid on this
particular box. If more people knew
why
this was possible, they would
quickly realize . . . ” His cheek twitched in place for a couple of
seconds, and then he forced a smile out over that. “Oh, very nice. Very clever.
They suspected I was about to spill a bean or three. You see?”

“Now, I don’t think that’s very nice,” I said, not
so much to him as to everyone I knew who was hearing me through him. “You’re
talking about how he managed to torch off Bridgehead’s sun, right?”

Aram’s mouth shook around a bit, but nothing came
through.

“Hey, MacHanichy,” I called out to the surrounding
air, “would you just own up that we’ve got just as much of a stake in knowing
how Marius does what he does as anyone else? I imagine you and I both rather
like the idea of not being stellar stew, so how about you at least
pretend
to listen to what I’ve got to offer?”

“Or you could have connected to me directly,”
MacHanichy said, now at my elbow, “and asked me that way.”

“Yeah,” I said to him, “but admit it—this way, I
had far more of your attention upfront.”

“What do you want, Sim?”

“You let Aram here tell me what he knows—as an
adjunct to him telling you—and then I keep that information in our inner circle
so we can actually
use
it to keep from dying. Besides, this way it’ll
come out all the faster. How about that?”

“Why? So your diplomat friend Ulli can pretend
she’s instigating a ‘balance of power’ by telling everyone about it anyway?
She’s said as much about other things.”

“Then I tell her to clam up until—”

“Until when? Until everyone’s kissed and made up? Listen,
you think things are bad right now? This is nothing compared to what kind of
destabilization you’re going to get if she talks
and
Angharad executes
her little schism—which she’s well on her way to making public, isn’t she? Your
liaison, Kallhander, he filed a detailed deposition on that particular matter.
It made for
absorbing
reading. The only reason we didn’t throw Ulli and
her sidekick into the tank was because we had at least as much back pressure on
us to not screw up the summit. And now that
that’s
off the table, we can
afford to be pickier about what we choose to look the other way over.”