Flight of the Vajra (106 page)

“—which was also sabotaged,” Cioran said, “by a
man who took my dear Ludmilla for all she was worth. At least, that’s what I
told everyone else. It was
I
who had been taken for all I was worth.”

“That being the same man responsible for
engineering the sabotage in the first place, by the way.” Aram pressed his
fingers together, looking down into the little steeple formed there. “He was
told to execute that particular job any way he could, and with as little to
trace it back to us as possible. So he went and put his trust in a third party
to do that job, one who wouldn’t even have to return when it was finished. One
who had what he believed was a sterling reputation for difficult work. One who,
in fact, thrived on just such chaos.”

“You,” I said.

“One
of
me, anyway. I set that up through a
true-human intermediary who I later disposed of, something which by then I’d
gotten very good at. —Anyway, the whole mission made for an interesting
experiment in more ways than one, actually. While I was all the way out there,
far removed from the jumpnets, I couldn’t send back any experiential
information to my repositories, at least not until the actual rescue came
through. My instructions were to harvest as much telemetry about the
experiments as I could, then commandeer the manufaxture platform and the ship, destroy
the former, sabotage the latter in certain predetermined ways, abandon the ship
at a pre-arranged point, then go into hibernation on board and wait for the
salvage team to claim the results.”

“How did it
really
go down, though?”

Aram’s shrug might as well have been about a bad
game of golf. “I didn’t hide myself as well as I had believed I had. I was
discovered by the experiment team right after the first test run, and so I had
to wind everything up a good deal faster than was preferred. That one test run
ended with the destruction of Trungpa, which generated more than enough
information. With that, I arranged everything as I’d been told and waited.

“But then I had the same thought I always did:
what’s
the fun in everything going according to plan?

“See, Henré knows this, but it bears repeating
here. The one thing that’s driven me more than anything else since I took on
this new form is the ability to have experiences above and beyond anything a
single human could have in his lifetime. Or even a single human being with a
hundred lifetimes. To go to excess not just once, but many times in parallel,
behind endless different faces.” His voice wound down. “To ruin, to betray, to
bring low a thousand empires, to cut a billion throats, and to never once
suffer any consequences whatsoever. To burn everything to the ground and walk
away from it clean, over and over again . . . and to keep every
moment of it to savor for all time.”

“How dull it all must have been,” Angharad said.

Aram nodded, letting his head dangle down. “As dull
as only infinity can be.”

It didn’t take Aram long
to shake off
his gloom and continue. Just as well, since Angharad was about the only one of
us who had a speck of sympathy to send his way.

“So as you can imagine, Exoluft’s hired guns never
got their cargo. I waited for them to show up, then took their ship—it was
disappointingly easy; they weren’t prepared for
anything
out there—and
placed their precious cargo in the hold of another ship, under a false
manifest. I also send out some tips about the cargo to any curious criminals,
by way of the contacts I’d gleaned through that intermediary who set me up on
the job. I thought it would be fun to watch that little treasure sink below the
waves and stay there, until someone else’s curiosity raised it back up into the
light again. That someone turned out to be Arsèni, and so I had to do a little
extra footwork to put myself into the hands of people on Bridgehead, apart from
him, who would make things interesting. But by then it was already getting
dull, as Her Grace put it. And after spending some time in Marius’s company I
realized his kind was the best I could hope for in the circles I’d chosen.”

“What was it, then, that you were truly hoping
for?” Angharad said.

Aram considered this and seemed surprised by his
own answer. “A . . . community, I suppose. Even if nothing more than
a community of the noncommuning, a gathering-together of those who would never
gather together. Others ‘like me’, in whatever sense that might be. I had gone
further than anyone else I knew in order to become a maverick, and I had hoped
doing so would put me in the company of other mavericks. They would see my
work, then throw open their arms and welcome me in, and together we would
create something even greater than any one of us mavericks alone could have
made. All I had to do was be patient. As long as I spread myself widely enough
and waited patiently enough, it was inevitable. But it never happened—not like
that, anyway. I merely found myself in the company of one angry, violent,
hopeless case after another.”

He’d given me a version of the same speech before,
but it was only then in the company of all the others that I saw its real
meaning to me. Because
I’d done something like that too, hadn’t I?
I’d
thrown myself out into the ocean and left myself drift for years, in the belief
that just doing so would cause me to wash up on the right shore.

“I don’t mind realizing I’m a fool,” he went on, a
stubborn undertone in those words. “Not as long as out of that I have some
better idea of where to turn. But there really isn’t anywhere for a
true
maverick to go, is there? Not anywhere where he can expect company, that is.”

“I believe you are wrong about that,” Angharad
said. “For why else, then, would you have come to me?”

“To prove you wrong?” This time he didn’t sound
stubborn; he sounded downright resigned.

“There’ll be plenty of time to find out who’s
wrong later,” I said, “when we’re not worrying about half the galaxy burning
up. Let’s look at what’s in front of us. How much do you know about Marius’s
setup here?”

Aram was all business again. “Marius let me in on
his plans before he was interrupted.”

“Which means he’s probably changed everything by
now.”

“True, but I took some initiative—I suppose that’s
one way to put it—and found out for myself what he had in mind. My suspicions
about my role in his work were confirmed when I found the version of the plans
he’d given me, and the version he kept for himself, were remarkably unalike. It
was easier to find those things out than I anticipated; he was amazingly
diligent about his security in some ways and amazingly sloppy in others.”

“Oh, you saw that too?”

“You proved it to me with your little escapade in
the car, remember?”

The plan Marius had engineered in secret, as Aram
laid out for us, mostly squared with my own guesses. Marius had planned to use
the resources of a planet where there were plenty of spare engines and a
generous protomic reservoir (“He said ‘a terraform project will do’
 
”, Aram told me), where
he could instantiate many separate Dezaki nodes. Only one of those nodes at a
time, however, would have an instance of his own personality, which he’d been
preparing to have backed up in a number of anonymous places once he got off
Bridgehead. The other nodes were built and populated straight from the original
template and were all on standby for the time being, awaiting orders. We’d also
guessed correctly about many aspects of the ransom-taking being automated: he
was planning to set up a base wherever a big enough reservoir was available,
which would—like the automated ship factory in the Trungpa experiment—crank out
ships pre-equipped with targeting data. If the ships in question didn’t get a
countermand order within a specific length of time, they’d leap to within
spitting distance of the star in question, then perform a sun-fueled leap,
destroying the star in question in the process, and that would be the end of
that.

It only looks airtight, I thought, because you
haven’t poked at it yet.

“Right. Order of business,” I said. “Get control
over the other nodes, send out cancellation orders for everything that’s been
instantiated, and turn off that factory. The hard part is
how
.”

“From the sound of it,” Kallhander said, “Marius
has all the keys, literally and metaphorically. The process cannot be
countermanded without him.”

Ioné shook her head. “That’s not a given and
shouldn’t be assumed to be one.”

“How else is it possible?” Ulli flipped a hand
through the diagram Aram had sketched between us. “It’s not as if we have
anything to bribe him with, and his cronies are also quite out of reach.”

I looked at Aram and realized my urge to hear out
the rest of that conversation between him and Angharad about who was wrong
hadn’t been frivolous.

“Aram,” I said, “you told me all the other Dezaki
nodes Marius instantiated, barring his own, were from the default template, the
one with your core personality.” I was surprised this insight hadn’t hit me
sooner. “Including his sidekicks here. Doesn’t that mean all of them are also
just as disgusted by him as you are?”

His surprise faded as quickly as it came. “Possible,
but not likely.”

“Why?”

“When you load the personality into the body
template, the default option with the personality is to replay everything from
the beginning. In just about every instance before this, whenever I fell into
someone’s hands, I’d been loaded from the full replay anyway, the better to
keep all the accrued experience. Chances are, now that he’s controlling the
process explicitly, he chose not to do that—he might have replayed their
personalities only up to slightly before I first met him, to avoid any
problems. This would exclude, conveniently enough for him, the point where I’d
reached my full-blown sense of disgust for it all. That feeling didn’t really
touch off until after I’d met him and spent some time in his company.”

“The last straw,” Enid said.

“But that feeling was there, waiting,” Angharad
said. “All it needed was the right impetus.”

“I suppose so.” Aram’s expression had become—well,
not curious, but at least less indifferent. “This sounds as if it’s becoming
part of a plan.”

“It might well be,” Angharad went on. “You yourself
said these instances Marius has surrounded himself with and placed his trust in
are all derived from you. An earlier version of you, but you all the same. You,
whose dismay and disgust with your own choices remains just as nascent in them.
We may well be able to use that to your advantage, to set both them
and
us free in the process.” She looked at the city outside, foggy with night and
refracted starlight. “I owe my people a few words. I thought I might tailor
that speech to reach the ears of your brothers and sisters, too, Aram. Perhaps
they will then come to the same revelations you did, and turn on him.”

“I should have guessed,” Cioran said to Ulli. “Of
all the plans she might come up with, hers would be to
talk them out of it.
”

“It’s what I would have done,” Ulli said,
grumpily. “Or at least tried to do.”

Ioné and Eotvo faced Kallhander, the first one speaking
for both of them: “Is it feasible?”

Kallhander didn’t answer at first, but instead
sent us all an image, a wild tangle of ropes and ribbons that made the
key-revocation diagram we’d seen earlier look like a model of simplicity. “It
all depends on what sort of behavior restrictions Marius has implemented. There
exist in the Dezaki template any number of extensions for such things—places
for a third party to insert behavioral overrides. But when we looked at Aram’s
instance, they didn’t seem to have been used.”

“Which means,” I said, “you can’t even verify that
they actually
do
anything.”

“They are wired up, if that’s what you mean, but
no, we never verified that any programming added through those extensions would
be honored.”

“You’re . . . half-right,” Aram said. “They
are honored, for a while. Just enough to get in the door, so to speak. Then
after certain other conditions are met, they’re spontaneously disengaged. That’s
part of how I was able to earn people’s trust and then betray them, even as
they were making use of me. And they’re not always disengaged in large, obvious
ways, either.”

“In other words,” I said, “just enough to make
things
interesting
.”

“You’re catching on.”

“You leave enough clues for anyone to catch on. —Angharad,
you prep your speech. It’s about time they saw us doing something out in the
open anyway.” It wasn’t as if outwardly we’d been sitting around doing nothing
at all—we’d made small talk and little I-don’t-know-what-to-do speeches to give
anyone bothering to watch us a solid sense we’d given up. But Angharad agreed,
and went into her office to give the impression she needed privacy. In our
pirate CL space, though, she was still among us.

“So that’s
maybe
an attack on the help,”
Enid said. “And we’ve already started working out an attack on him taking over
the keys, but from everything you’ve said, that’s only something we can do in a
really tiny amount of time. And there’s one more thing I was thinking about.
He
has to send the order to disable everything, right?”

“Assuming we don’t beat it out of him first, yes,”
I said.

“Ugh, don’t tempt me. —But maybe we can trick it
out of him.”

Everyone else looked like they were suddenly
getting ideas, me included, but Enid went on.

“Maybe there’s some way—I don’t know how, but
somehow—we can fake a message from the outside saying that this or that world
has caved in, and then we use his answer to figure out how to unravel this knot.
Does he still have control over the outside network?”