Flight of the Vajra (104 page)

“Yes—by cutting
themselves
off.” Now
that
sounded like scolding, I thought. “Not by cutting it off for others against
their will.”

“And what if those ‘others’,” the Prince said,
“are smothering you through their own inability to do just that? No, not
inability;
refusal
. What if they refuse, and not just once but again and
again, down the generations?”

 “Then that’s your problem, not theirs,” Enid
said. “Isn’t it? And besides, if you hate it so much, you said yourself that our
whole way of life is falling out of style anyway. All
you
have to do is
wait.” She faced Marius squarely. “Why are you both so hopped-up about making
something happen right now? You’re going to outlive me by who knows how much,
so what’s the big rush?”

For a moment, before he spoke, I thought I could
see the Marius that had climbed up into the tree with her. He spoke as if her
were trying to explain a personal failing to a friend.

“Because if we have to wait,” Marius said, “that
means everyone else has to wait, too. Including all the people who can’t afford
to wait. All the people who want to make something new instead of just
inheriting whatever exists, but no one around them will let them.”

“You said something like that to me before.” The
angry lines in Enid’s face smoothed down a bit, but only a bit. “I guess you think
you’re one of those people who wanted to ‘make something new’, yeah? Along with
me, too? Well, not like this I don’t.”

I closed my eyes to ignore them for a moment.

Side-band; out-of-band; come on, come on, you
remember something about that, don’t you? A way to proxy CL communications on
top of other things . . .
bodily telemetry.
That was it. The
bodily telemetry signals. They go out to and come back from everything in the
vicinity that’s designed to receive and replay them, from your clothes to the
very room you’re sitting in,
and Marius didn’t turn those off last time
either.
And if you clue people in ahead of time, you can piggyback all
kinds of other traffic on top of those signals. You can’t pass more than a
simple stream of text most of the time, depending on the bandwidth available,
but what else do you need?

I opened my eyes and started preparing a CL payload
for everyone.

Marius stepped back from her and turned towards
Eotvo. “How much have they told you about me?”

“That you’re responsible for a violent uprising on
Bridgehead,” she said. “That you are also most likely for its sun going
subnova.” (
Subnova
: good word to use, I thought.) “That you’ve attacked
Rollain and cut it off from the rest of the universe. There’s more, but those
are the most salient points.”

“You understand, then, that your own sun may be just
as vulnerable.”

“Yes.”

“As well as the sun of just about any world you
could name.”

Weakly: “Yes.”

“With these things firmly in mind, then, I’m going
to need a few things from you. The first is the complete keyring to this
planet’s protomic infrastructure.”

“That’s going to be very difficult—”

“It’s only difficult because you don’t
want
to do it, so I’ll give you some incentive. For every solar day you fail to
provide me with the full keyring for the planet, another star with a population
will be destroyed. If there’s any attempt to interfere with me taking control
of the keyring, you can expect the same thing.”

“If you are so determined to destroy,” Angharad
said, “then destroy us and be done with it. Or destroy me and be done with it,
since that is your intention.”

“Angharad, no!” Enid seized the other woman’s
sleeve. I lost my place in preparing the payload and cursed out loud. At least
anyone listening would only think I was just swearing at Marius.

Marius stopped and gave vent to a long sigh. He
wasn’t angry. He looked more like he was about to say,
Come down off that
high horse of yours and stop acting like such a fool.

“I’m not necessarily interested in you being dead,
Your Grace,” he said. “I’ve learned at least that much. Martyrdom is
pointless—both for me and you. It goes hand in hand with something else I’ve
learned: that destroying something is easy, as long as you’re only destroying
it physically. And in this age—” He shrugged at all of us. “—name me one thing
that
does
actually get destroyed physically. Not very much, and less of
it every year. But destroying the
meaning
of something . . . that’s
much more powerful., And much more challenging. You can’t just destroy such a
thing once; you have to destroy it a trillion times over, for all time.”

Once again I could hear him say through his tone,
his gestures:
Who else wouldn’t find that interesting? Only an idiot, that’s
who.

“Which is why,” Marius went on, “I’d rather start
by having others blame
you
for destroying them. It’s crucial that the
burden of responsibility be squarely on your shoulders.”

“Seems like you want it there anyway, doesn’t it?”
the Prince said.

“Earlier, you asked him—“ Marius indicated the
Prince with a head-node. “—a very simple question:
What do you want?
I
think I’m rather lucky in that I’m one of the few people I’m aware of who knows
exactly what he wants and isn’t afraid to go get it.”

“So what
is
it?” Enid just about jeered at
him.

“I want all of this—” He gestured at the bunch of
us. “—Old Way, Highend, Continuum, all of it—I want it all
out of the way.
I want this . . . this perpetuated stagnation you call a
civilization, I want it broken up. I want all the ideas that keep it alive to
be killed off once and for all, and I want something new, truly new, to grow
out of the ruins. And thanks to the help of a few others, it’s now all possible
to do exactly that—starting with you,” and he aimed those last words right at
Angharad.

“And now that you know that,” he added, “what are
you going to do about it?”

Silence, again, which seemed like the answer that
satisfied him best.

“Exactly,” he said, and turned away.

“I’m in the process of having the keyrings
aggregated,” Eotvo said. All that stumbling and hesitation in her voice—was
that there to make us understand the gravity of the whole thing, or just to
make Marius feel more like he was in control? “There are many redundant rings
with a great deal of overlap, so the reassignment process may take some time.
You have to understand there are very real physical and technical limitations
to doing this. It may take longer than a solar day to finish everything. I’ll provide
them to you as they are completed, in good faith.”

“You have
got
to be kidding!” I shouted at
Eotvo, once again losing my place prepping the payload. Her only response was
to shake her head at me.

“Well,” Marius said, “I’ll take what you have,
then.”

Yeah, I’ll just bet you will, I thought.

Everyone’s CL spaces, mine included, lit up as
Marius instantiated a one-way link. “This,” he said, “is why.”

This is Marius Astatke
, now of
Continuum, formerly of Bridgehead.

[Marius stood, unaccompanied, in a space
reminiscent of the ceiling-less atrium he had confined us in when we had been
in his car.]

You may well be aware of a number of recent
events involving both of those worlds, and perhaps a few others mentioned along
with them. There was, quite recently, an attempt to seize control of
Bridgehead’s infrastructure, which ended with my departure from the planet
after certain demands of mine were met. I was responsible for this, as others
have stated. I am also responsible for the subsequent destruction of Bridgehead’s
sun and everything in the system. This was not an accident.

[Images harvested from the public sensory surfaces
on Bridgehead replayed before us: splintering streets, squirmers plowing up out
of the ground, the ocean smoldering and boiling off.]

You may also be aware that communications with
the terraform colony Rollain were recently lost, and that an IPS detachment has
also not returned from investigating that incident. I am responsible for both
of these things. Again, they are not accidents.

I now speak to you from Continuum, which has
agreed to surrender its entire infrastructure to me in exchange for its
continued existence. Its sun, and the sun of every other world within the reach
of my voice, is mine to preserve or destroy as I see fit. You have already seen
one demonstration of this, which you must realize to be outside the realm of
natural possibility. I imagine you are willing to do just about anything to
prevent another, and another, and another.

[Endless suns swam into and out of view like so
many cosmic schools of fish.]

But beyond the planet itself, I have what to
many of you will be a far more valuable and relevant asset.

I have, and hold hostage, the Sixteenth Supreme
Kathaya of the Old Way, Angharad il-Jakaya.

I also have, and hold hostage, the several
thousand refugees she assisted in their flight from Bridgehead, who have
established a homestead here courtesy of Continuum.

I also have, and hold hostage, a number of
persons within the Kathaya’s personal retinue. Among them are a number of
celebrities whose names should be familiar to anyone hearing this. To spare us
further tedium, I’ve attached to this message a census of all the relevant
parties.

[Faces of all those he mentioned and many more,
mine included, slid by. And in that moment I sent my payload.]

+Folks,
I said to a small select few,
listen
up. There’s a payload attached to this message. Install it. It’s a
steganography package which should let us stay in touch even if our connections
are proxied or shut down completely. The installer should also wipe any traces
of the install, or this conversation, from your logs. Use the CL keytag SILENCE
to talk. Good luck.

[I prayed everyone was not too preoccupied to hear
me.]

Now, to business
[Marius went on].

I have computed that it will take approximately
two and a half solar months for my message to propagate throughout the whole of
the IPS-signatory worlds. The first Old Way world that will hear these words is
Merridon. Not Old Way by tradition, but nominally so thanks to the immigrant
populace that arrived there before the doors were closed, and which flourishes
to this day. They are “Old Way enough”, as the saying goes, to serve as the
first example. The timing of your reply to my message with be pro-rated against
the estimated time of its receipt, so I anticipate some delays. A list of such
worlds that has officially proclaimed some degree of allegiance is also
attached, along with expected response times.

Here are my instructions.

Every world that officially identifies itself
with the Old Way will have one solar day from receipt of this message to
disavow, entirely and unconditionally, any and all allegiance to, fidelity to,
adherence to, or avowal of the Old Way, as well as any ties with the Achitraka,
be they social, financial, political, or otherwise, and to refuse to recognize
any such authority, in perpetuity. This disavowal will be enacted through
appropriate legislation and enforcement, under terms to be further dictated.

Any world so identified that openly refuses to comply
will be destroyed.

For every day that I receive no replies from
worlds outside of the timeframe for which a reply is expected, another world
will be chosen at random to be destroyed. Any attempts to interfere with this
process will meet the same result.

Any attempts by a specific, identifiable world
to interfere with this process will cause that world’s immediate destruction.

Any attempts to broker negotiations will be
ignored.

Any attempts on the part of the Achitraka to
invalidate the Kathaya’s spiritual authority will be wasted breath. It is the
Old Way itself that must be renounced, not just any one avatar of it.

That said . . . you may be surprised
to find, after relatively little introspection, that it won’t be as difficult
as you think to turn your backs on her.

After all, you’ve already been doing it in
droves, haven’t you?

There was nothing
for us to do after
that but go back to the house. There were a few closing statements on Marius’s
part, mostly admonitions not to do anything he considered stupid.

“If I thought it would matter,” he said, “I’d be
CL-capping the bunch of you. But I look at it this way: maybe it’s better if
the shackles aren’t things you can directly see. Or fight back against.
Besides, now that your hosts have given me access to their infrastructure, it’s
not like there isn’t anything I can’t see going on between the bunch of you
anyway.”

Inwardly, I thought:
Already proving you wrong
there, son.

Outwardly, I gave him the best bit of stink-eye I
could conjure up at the moment.

Marius walked up to Enid and allowed her, too, to
glower at him. He didn’t get more than a breath drawn in before she spat. It
landed on a forelock of his page-boy hair and stuck there, and I could have
sworn I saw him flinch from it.

“Giving back another kiss?” he said. “We didn’t
share
that
many.”

“What’s the big deal?” she said, lips still
curled, as he reached up to wipe it off. “With all those spare bodies you’ve
got to go around, why get worked up over a little saliva in the face? Or a hole
in the head?”

Marius blotted down his hair with an extruded
corner of a sleeve. “Speaking of which—I’m going to need that toy of yours.”

“Then come and get it,” she dared.

He didn’t come and get it. One of Marius’s retinue
collared her from behind; she struggled for all of a second before realizing
his arm was very thick and her neck was very thin.

Marius reached over, undid her fingers, and took
the p-knife from her hand.

“Truth be told,” he said, “I’m more interested in
what you’d do with this than without it, but I’m not stupid. Besides, there’s
enough other people here to all but guarantee that one of them will attempt to
do something foolish . . . although I imagine you’ll call on them not
to.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Enid sneered.

“You said it yourself. There’s nothing here,
especially not me, that you can shoot or stab that will make a speck of
difference. It’s all unfolding automatically, out there.” He waved a hand up at
what would have been the sky. “All of my other instances know what I know and
are waiting for the same things I’m waiting for. So . . . go on home
and get some rest. From here on out you’re just like everyone else: spectators.”

We turned and began to stumble down the stairs
towards the big double doors that led into the city. Enid hung on to one of my
arms; I put the other around Angharad. Behind me I heard sniffling and gagging.
The sensory surfaces flanking the stairs told me it was Ulli and Cioran,
leaning precariously against each other, almost missing a step here and there.
Behind them, Ioné and Eotvo, faces as blotchy as if they’d been slapped. The
fact they could flush and even weep only peeved me all the more now.

“And I
know
,” Marius called out at us, “you’re
just going to take that as a call to action! Aren’t you?”

He wasn’t jeering. He sounded more like a
disappointed lover, jilted one too many times.

At the rear was Kallhander, opening and closing a
fist over and over again. He paused and looked back through the closing doors
of the antechamber behind us, where the Prince smirked and tipped at a hand at
him from his brow:
Be seeing you.

The IPS squad that had pointed guns at Marius now
formed a wall in front of us to keep back the crowd that had formed at the
bottom of the stairs. They’d all heard and seen the same message. Half of them
wanted to storm up the steps and pull Marius’s spine out; the other half
shouted out names—mostly Angharad’s—and reached out for us. She hesitated, then
reached back out to them between the guards, letting her hands pass through theirs
until we were bundled into a troop transport and the doors melded shut.

+Enid, can you hear me?
I CLed. I was
attempting to use voice emulation over the link—if it didn’t work, I’d drop
back to text.

+Loud and clear, boss!
She didn’t sound
anything like she looked—miserable on the outside, elated on the inside. I
hoped everyone else was as good at outwardly faking it.

+How many others on this channel? Let’s take a
head count.

+My own census says . . . everyone is
present and accounted for. Even Eotvo.

One by one, with no outward sign they were so glad
to hear and be heard from, everyone chimed in. Only Ulli stirred and looked
like she was about to exclaim something out loud, but Cioran shushed her from
the inside.

Cioran:
+The more we look like we’ve been
clubbed down, the less curious anyone else is likely to be about what we’re
doing. To that end—everyone, follow Kallhander’s example!

It took a lot for us all not to laugh outwardly at
that. Kallhander, seated across from me, covered his mouth and rubbed at it.

Kallhander:
+I believe Aram was also added to
the circuit, but I don’t hear him yet.

Me:
+Short-range protocol, remember? It only
works in the immediate area, and his body is locked up in the little IPS
outpost. I sent it to him, but I don’t think it reached him. Besides, he won’t
have anything to say unless he’s moved in with us. To that end, we should stick
together—a couple dozen meters distance, tops. As long as we’re all in the
house, it shouldn’t be a problem. Just no wandering off without being cleared
first.

Ulli:
+Is there any way we could have Aram
brought here?

Me:
+I still have a favor pending with the IPS.
Provided they haven’t crapped
too
many cookies in the last ten minutes,
they might still oblige.

The link was beginning to give me a headache— when
piggy-backing the telemetry protocol, there was less bandwidth available than
I’d realized, and I hadn’t time to optimize anything. I spent the rest of that
ride, short as it was, asking everyone to hold for a bit while I tinkered. It
took me only a few moments to see how my rush job could be drastically
improved, and without compromising the security of the whole thing. By the time
we arrived at the house, I was doing echo tests back and forth between the other
members of the group that were a shaky but acceptable step down from a
sight-and-sound-only CL feed.

I caught a glimpse of people massing in the lot a
few plots down from our house. They looked like despair would have been a step
up for them.

“Angharad,” I said (out loud; it didn’t matter if
this was overheard), “you’d better say something to the people. Anything.”

“I prepared a statement,” she said. “It is meager,
I admit. All it says is that . . . that for now I encourage everyone
to remain calm, keep close to the ones they love, and that I will make a more
complete statement about my position shortly.”

She sent out that broadcast and followed me
inside. The crowd in the nearby lot didn’t look all that appeased.

I went back to the liquor cabinet and went through
the motions of pouring everyone fresh drinks. (For Enid, there was macetera juice
instead of alcohol.) Everyone was outwardly resigned, but within our new shared
CL space we were already hard at work.

“First question,” I CLed (again,
sub rosa
).
“Why did you give Marius the keychain?”

“Because we didn’t.” Eotvo showed us a
diagram—overlapping ovals and circles, various lines piping them into and out
of each other—that represented the key/subsystem block infrastructure for the
planet, all painted over in green. “It takes time for the existing control keys
to be invalidated and to allow new ones to be assigned to him, and to have
those keys propagate through the whole system. It’s a physical process; the
substrate has to reconfigure itself, and that buys us some time.” A red glow representing
Marius’s keys began to diffuse its way through the system, crowding out the
green. “However, we decided to gamble on Marius’s ignorance of how our key
system works.”

“That wasn’t much of a gamble,” Cioran said. “After
all,
nobody
knows how your key system works!”

“After this, they sure will,” I said. “You’ve kept
all your local infrastructure under wraps by segregating the IPS into its own
standalone segment, and anything instantiated offworld—” I tilted my head towards
Ioné. “—is made with the same substrate everyone else uses and not your special
sauce. But I take it you’re less worried about losing your family substrate
recipe than you are about losing, well,
everything
.”

“We can’t afford to lose perspective, no.” Ioné
shook her head. “But again, his ignorance is useful here. Our system allows us
to generate special escrow keys, which don’t need to be explicitly defined in
the master keyring to be acknowledged by the system.” The map began to turn
green again, from its inside-most convolutions on out. “That’ll allow us to
take control back, but . . . ”

“ . . . there are drawbacks,” Eotvo went
on. “Most prominent, and relevant, is that Marius is effectively holding all of
us hostage at once. The minute he senses anything wrong, it’s safe to assume he
will make good on his threats and destroy another star.”

“And it doesn’t have to be
us
he makes his
threats good on,” I said. “It just has to be someone somewhere. From everything
I’ve guessed at, he can do it, and he can probably do it a hundred times over
with the resources he’s stolen.” And, I thought, the one being who knows how
and is actually willing to
talk
is a little out of reach right now.

“So whatever we do,” Kallhander said, “first we
have to make sure Marius’s command-and-control infrastructure is offline—”

“No, no.” I shook my head. “We have to dig even
deeper than that. We can’t just pull the plug.” I had to marvel at how a phrase
like that could survive use across generations that had never once pulled a physical
plug. “From the way he’s talking, it sounds like things are programmed to go
boom all by themselves. Take it all offline, and we’d just be doing him a
favor. We need to figure out how to revoke any standing orders he has,
then
lock him out of what he thinks is now his own system.”

Even Eotvo didn’t have anything to say to that. I
looked around; everyone was now doubly sunk down in thought.

“I know,” I went on. “Tall order to fill, right?
Because the only way I can think of doing
that
is by going through his
crew. They’re all instances of the Dezaki template, so there must be some kind
of common weakness we can exploit.” I’d gotten used to thinking of “our” Dezaki
instance as just Aram, and of the template itself—and all the other instance of
it, especially Marius’s—as “Dezaki”. It helped. “How many of them are there,
anyway?”

Kallhander showed me a diagram of the Prince’s
ship. “Assuming each of those instances needs minimal space, he could easily
have stored a few hundred. Possibly as many as a thousand if they were all
stored the way Aram was in Marius’s house.”

“There was something else Marius said,” Ulli said,
“about how many of
him
there were. Do you suppose by that he meant
. . . ” She put a hand over her mouth. “Well, I suppose that
would
be the next logical step for someone like him, now, wouldn’t it?”

Kallhander nodded. “From what we’ve seen of the
Dezaki template, it wouldn’t be difficult for him to replay his own backup into
it instead of the distributed backup Dezaki himself used.”

“And since he’s not exactly worried about getting
busted for such a stunt,” I added, “he can instantiate as many copies as he
wants of that, and send them all over the place. Plus, he can afford to do it
as a rush job in days and not weeks. If one of them doesn’t take because he’s
in a hurry, he’s got any number of others that might. After all, why not? He
had a whole
planet
’s worth of raw substrate to use over on Rollain.
Probably didn’t even have to fight anyone for the keys there, either. And
nobody’s going to bust him for violating parallel instantiation laws.”

“Not if I have something to say about it,”
Kallhander intoned.

“Wait a sec.” Enid frowned, rising from her seat
as if the teacher had singled her out from the class. “You said ‘him’ and ‘he’.
Which
he?
Which
him? If they’re all the same, how do any of them
know which one to take orders from in the first place?”

Pin-drop silence ensued.

Congratulations, Enid, I thought. For the first
time in memory, you’ve stumped all of us but good.

“I was on the verge of asking the same question
myself,” Angharad said. “Very well done.”

“Well, it is pretty confusing, isn’t it?” Enid
looked pleased with her handiwork. “Because the only way I can think of to fix
that is that the one that’s here, with us,
is
the original. Or at least
the master, or whatever you want to call it. He’s the one who has to give all
the most crucial orders, right?”

“That might not be the case.” Ioné replaced the
key diagram with a schematic that was meant to represent a cluster of Dezaki
nodes all in communication, slowly forming a circle around one of their kind.
“There are many existing algorithms that allow automatic creation of a
hierarchy, or a command structure, from a number of peer nodes. The Dezaki
template might well have something like that as part of its general
programming.” (The circle became a tree graph, with the centermost node now at
the top.)

“Here’s the thing, though,” I said. “Who’s to say
that any one of those nodes is going to follow such programming, especially if
the main programming in any one of those units is a cortical replay anyway? Somehow
Marius doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who takes order from anyone. Not
even
himself
. If he’s done what he says, there’s probably copies of him
floating around, but they’re all strictly for backup—especially since he’s got
the default Dezaki template to do whatever dirty work he needs. So if you ask
me, he’s bluffing about having more than one of him. At least, more than one of
him being live and walking around.”