Flight of the Vajra (102 page)

I let him go on. It sounded like his anger was
eager to do the talking anyway, but to my surprise his next words were
better-tempered.

“You’ve got quite a group of people together there,”
he continued, “you included. That was some beautiful improvisation you pulled
off on Bridgehead. The results speak for themselves. Made a lot of people mad
at you, and yes, it was because they didn’t have their own acts together for
whatever reason. They’ll get over it. But the stakes are not just you and your
friends anymore. Not even a few dozen thousand refugees. The stakes are,
literally, universal. And you stand a very good chance of putting your foot
right into it for all the rest of us, by trying to do what
you
think is
the right thing.”

“What do I have to do to convince you to let me do
this?”

“Assuming that’s even possible, you need to start
by offering me something more than just ‘I swear on my mother’s lantern’.”

“Fine,” I said, and stuck out my wrists at him.

He blinked at them. “Care to explain?”

“You let me do this,” I said, “and trust me to
keep it to the people that matter, at least until Marius is in custody and the
schism is official. Then it’s going to be fair game anyway; you know that. But
if word about what Marius has been doing gets out with the general public before
then, you have my permission to throw my ass in a cooler. You pick the charge.
—But only
my
ass, you hear me? Nobody else gets touched.”

“That’s going to be difficult to authorize, let
alone explain away—”

“If it comes to it, you can say I stole the
information somehow, okay? I’ll even own up to leaking it. I don’t care what it
costs
me.
I just want a fighting chance of our own, one where we don’t
have to wait on other people to save us. And after what just happened, do you
blame us?”

MacHanichy’s
Please don’t make my job any
harder than it already is
expression didn’t milk any sympathy out of me. “You
see what I mean?” he said. “You think you’re the only one who can take the
risk. You think you’re the only one who ever does.”

“I do it because I know it’s worth it.”

“I’ll get back to you. But don’t hold your breath,
either of you.”

Aram gave me a plastic little smile after
MacHanichy vanished. “Whatever it is you think I have,” he said, “you’re
prepared to give up that much?”

“It’s not for me and you know it.”

“Given that you’re one of the many people you want
to keep from being killed, I’d say it
is
for you. —Besides, if you want
it that badly, from where I stand, you can have it. But you must know as well
as I do there are no guarantees what it’ll cost either of us in the long run.
Now all we have to do is wait for the nice men of the IPS to relax their grip a
little, so isn’t there something else you’d rather be doing than staring me
down?”

I took his advice, and stepped into the adjoining
beer garden to pull myself a pint. Continuum had provided us all with an
economic bootstrap, an advance on our future productivity just to get gears
turning, and I decided to do my part and satisfy my thirst at the same time. On
coming back out through the garden gate with the mug in hand, my eyes met
Aram’s again—or rather, he was giving the mug in my hand (and at my mouth) a
lingering look. With no body in this space and no access to one, there were all
sorts of things he could only spy on. It was the kind of reincarnation of
understanding you get about CL’s downsides that comes every so often, because
you see it in someone else instead of yourself. On a whim, I tried to connect
and offer him sensory input, but the connection was rejected with prejudice by
IPS’s firewall without it ever reaching him.

“It’s all right,” he said, his voice several
degrees less haughty than it had been. “I’ve never had much of a taste for the
stuff. A good wine, on the other hand . . . ”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

A lucky guess on his part as to what I was trying
to do, I thought. A lucky guess and an accurate one.

He was gone by the time I turned around once more. I
surrendered the glass and retraced my steps back to our house. Along the way
the neighbors with the garden and the backyard manufaxture were in the middle
of a polite argument about the waxy smells wafting downwind into the former from
the latter.

I was about halfway home
—I
can
call it that, right? I told myself—before Kallhander and Ioné made contact. No
overtures; they let me talk first.

“You’re still on desk probation?” I said.

Kallhander let a long pause go by before speaking.
“Indefinitely.”

“And Ioné?”

“The same. She technically did nothing wrong by
accessing information about the troop movements out to Rollain, but they
described that as part of a ‘pattern of behavior’ that merited an indefinite
suspension of duty. The only reason we haven’t been dismissed entirely is
because we provided them with the detailed report they asked for.”

“I know. They had fun rubbing my nose in it.”

Ioné, I noticed, was in fact connected, but had
said nothing.

“You guys did what you had to do,” I went on.

“Angharad said much the same thing,” Ioné finally
said. “She holds no grudge. She believed all along this would happen. She even
said she was grateful it was us and not someone else.”

And what idiots we were, I thought, to believe
that by this point them being disciplined for it wouldn’t make any difference.

“So what
can
you do?” I said.

“We aren’t allowed to wield IPS weaponry or access
internal resources beyond a certain grade,” Kallhander said, “but we can
perform certain other duties.”

“Anything stopping you from helping me compare
notes about something?”

“Not at all. Why?”

“Because I’m going to need to pick both your
brains about this fresh noose I just stuck my neck into.”

I saved the rest of it until I was in the house
and sitting across from both of them in the little room we’d designated as a
“sunroom”—one of the outside-facing rooms that got a nice exposure and sported
couches next to the window. No stretching out on that and napping now, though.
Instead, I gave them both a reduced version of the devil’s-deal I’d just
struck. Neither of them was looking at me by the time I was finished.

“You can scold me later about how stupid I am,” I
said, “or how this could have been done some other way, or what have you. What
I want to know is this: Based on both of your experiences with IPS from the
inside, what do you think they’re going to do with whatever Aram spills?
Assuming it’s actually useful information about Marius’s ongoing projects in
solar demolition, and not just him filling our ears with sand.”

“There are a few scenarios,” Ioné said, looking
marginally less ragged now. “For one, if Marius is in fact capable of using the
technology he captured to perform precise jumps—and that seems increasingly
likely—they may well try to use it to stage a counterattack and retake Rollain.”

“It’s not a question of political obstruction,”
Kallhander said. “IPS is entitled to act in a situation this extreme, expected
even, and to use whatever force they can muster when doing so.”

“I don’t see that coming out as anything other
than a giant mess,” I said. “Because, question two: what are they going to do if
he just torches the place and walk off? What
can
they do?”

“That would depend entirely on the answers Aram is
able to provide,” Kallhander said, but even he sounded like he was groping for
a response. “If he’s ever allowed to provide them.”

The afternoon light outside ebbed and bloomed, as
a layer of clouds formed and dissipated in the kilometers or of space overhead.
That plus the layers of clouds on the surface of Continuum itself (however thin
those were) made for sunlight that almost always seemed heavily diffused.
Something else for the atmospherics people to tinker with, I thought. I crossed
over to the little cabinet on the side of the room, found some of Cioran’s hoarded
liquor in it, and began filling glasses.

“I wish there was more we could do,” Kallhander
said quietly.

“There is,” I said, “but everything I can think of
would involve destroying whatever career either of you have left, at
best
.
I doubt you want advice of that caliber. To say nothing of what would happen to
you, Ioné.”

“Strictly speaking,” she said, “it’s not possible
for anything to happen to ‘me’.”

“No, but you know what I mean. I’m surprised IPS
didn’t send you back here with a note recommending you be de-instantiated.” I
reached over their shoulders and gave them both shots of Benimaru, which they
accepted. “You know, the IPS guy holding Aram’s leash gave me a little lecture
about the nerve I had for wanting to take responsibility for my own life, to
say nothing of the lives of everyone else down here. They just love doing that,
don’t they? They make you put your lives into their hands, and then get annoyed
when you try to take some of it back.”

“Yes,” Kallhander said.

I stopped with my drink halfway to my mouth. I’d
been expecting an argument, or at the least an apologia.

“You saw how I was compelled to treat you at
first,” he went on. “You were a subject that required special handling, and I
had rules to follow. You yourself seemed to understand that. And here, too, the
stakes are large enough that it’s a little foolish to expect IPS not to assert
itself aggressively. But none of that says it demands our sympathy or our
agreement.”

“His
or
mine,” Ioné said.

“So this means you’re tossing them your badges?” I
said.

Kallhander shook his head. “Not right away. But
. . . ”

“ . . . the limits of what we can do as
components of that system are becoming clear,” Ioné said. “When I was first
commissioned—by Continuum, that is; when they first instantiated my template—Central
Heuristics told me, ‘In the end, you can’t serve two masters. This is to find
out which one you will serve.’ Not in so many words, but that was the gist of
it. Continuum always regarded my time with IPS as experimental and provisional.
The IPS felt the same way, and did their best to create as many incentives as
possible to have me place IPS first in all things. They made sure any reports I
passed back to Continuum passed through their hands first. They knew in the end
they were bound to fail in keeping my allegiance, but again—they saw it as an
experiment. At the end of the experiment, they could assess the results and then
try again with whatever future iteration of my template Continuum offered them.”

“A sympathy arms race,” I said.

“That’s the best metaphor I’ve heard yet for it,”
Kallhander said.

“However,” Ioné went on, “there was only the most
provisional and tentative provision in my template for other sympathies being
paramount. Not other sympathies as a whole—just whichever one was to be ‘first
and last in all things’.”

That you are of the universe must be first and
last in all things.
Not Angharad’s words—they had been first spoken long before
she had ever appeared—but they might as well have been.

“So who or what won out?” I said.

“Not IPS and not Continuum either. That much ought
to be clear.”

“I imagine the rest of Continuum was unhappy about
that.”

“They would have been if it hadn’t been for the
fact that this gave them an opportunity to stage an even larger and more
all-encompassing experiment.” She nodded her head at the world outside. “Don’t
feel as though you are simply test subjects; that would mean I was one, too.
The reason for this experiment hasn’t been to house you and force you to
interact at Continuum’s whim, or something of that sort. It’s been to determine
in what way Continuum can live
next
. The current arrangement has
always
been provisional, in theory. This is the first time we have had a practical
opportunity to determine such a thing with a consenting audience. If you were
to want to leave tomorrow, we would stand in no one’s way.”

Not that we would have anywhere to go, I thought.

“But it benefits both of us to have you stay, and
prosper,” she continued. “Even if prosperity meant to leave for a better
arrangement. We know full well we could never get anyone to
choose
to
stay unless they had come to us because we offered something. This opportunity
was irreplaceable. And—” She looked over at Kallhander, who nodded for her to
go on. “—it spared us the decision of
engineering
such a situation. We
had considered creating a hardship that would have allowed us to be generous in
this manner. There were any number of ways we could this. The IPS’s internal
records, and the well-documented histories of many of its member worlds,
demonstrated any number of strategies for how this could be accomplished. All
the slow-burning conflicts between worlds, conducted silently, and sometimes
not-so-silently, served as good models. Aram and his kind were the most recent,
and tempting, example of this. He represents, he embodies, one possible set of
choices for us.”

I felt the inside of my mouth go dry even without
the alcohol.

On she went. “It was only until my own direct
contact with Angharad that the decision was made to not employ such a strategy.
All the trends told us a hardship of significant enough size would present
itself before long, and thatwe would be in a unique position to provide
assistance. The thesis involved in the creation of my template was that waiting
would be more difficult, but more worthwhile in ways we couldn’t predict
. . . and that Angharad would provide the point of view from which a
further revision to my template could be devised.”

That sidelong look at Kallhander, I thought—he
knew all this as well. I’d guessed as much when he’d nodded to her earlier, but
now I suspected his morose looks all along hadn’t just been because they’d had
their badges shelved.

But the other part of what Ioné was saying—it took
me seconds on end to get out the words that needed to be said:

“You were
designed
to be susceptible to Angharad’s
doctrine?” I fairly shouted. “Just to see what would happen?”

“It was one of many things that went into my
template. It was part of why I lobbied as hard as I did to be placed on this
assignment.”

The ecosphere they’ve been building here, I thought;
of
course
they didn’t built it overnight. It’s been pre-built for who
knows how long now. They were waiting for a reason to use it. Ditto the
greenery; ditto everything else.

“After you offered your own reputation as the
possible price for our protection,” she said, and her words came out with the
leaden air of the confession of a sin, “I feel all the more responsible to you.
But I am only one template among many. Central Heuristics has to consider my
input in a weighted fashion, and a few possible courses of action are becoming
clear. The first is to place faith in IPS—and in turn, you—to protect all of
us. The second is to employ Aram’s strategies in our own way, including using
his particular mode of propagation as an evolutionary improvement on our own
resilience strategies. This would come at the cost of negating any future
threats of such a magnitude—whether in the form of Aram’s propagation methods,
or in the form of Marius’s weaponry, or what have you. And the most consistent
and predictable way to do that is to . . . to ensure Continuum is the
only life form of our grade of sentience anywhere within our sphere of influence.
And my one miserable—little—vote—isn’t going to matter!”

She looked at the shotglass in her hand, then
closed her eyes and flung the whole drink down her throat in one long pull. She
used her free hand to cover her shut eyes, but there were already plenty of
tears leaking out by then—programmatic crocodile tears designed to soften the
blow of her words, I guessed, since no amount of booze poured down her throat
would produce that reaction.

Minutes went by, during which time the only thing
Kallhander and I did were drink our drinks and sit with Ioné in silence.

So this is what their hospitality costs us, I
thought: our complicity. Our knowing what our presence here means to Continuum,
and not being able to do a thing about it except sit and grind our jaws.

Then my CL just about burst into flames as Enid, Angharad,
Ulli and Cioran all attempted to get my attention at the same time. Apparently
we had a guest. Royalty, no less.

Since the one landing field
that was
adjacent to our homestead already had the
Vajra III
taking up its space,
Continuum had to instantiate a whole new one to accommodate our guest. He’d
arrived in a luxury-sized ship—it could easily have carried a crew of a couple
hundred—and the instantiation process for a space big enough to hold it took a
good couple of hours by itself, even with Continuum’s resources.

The eight of us—the seven of our core group, plus
Eotvo—assembled at the freshly-created gateway to the new landing field, a door
in the northwest corner of the homestead’s foundation. Eotvo had noticed
immediately how most of us in the group ranged anywhere from moody to appalled
at the mere presence of this guest (by then, Ioné had calmed back down and was
simply morose and detached), and we supplied her with an earful about why the
newly-reinstantiated Prince Nancelares was one of the last people we wanted to
be dealing with right now.

But there he was, in his fresh new body—this one
about ten solar-biological years older than the previous one, a handsome young
man who could have passed all too easily for to Marius’s cousin-sometime-removed.
Someone else I didn’t want to be mulling over more than I absolutely had to, I
thought. The mere fact he’d suited up in a new body this quickly told me he’d broken,
or at least skirted, yet another restriction. He’d kept at least one freshly-instantiated
body on standby somewhere, with his backups passively replayed into them; right
when his body on Bridgehead had died, he’d just designated which of the other
bodies-in-waiting to pick up where he’d left off. Illegal, of course, but we had
bigger felonies of his on our minds just then.