Flight of the Vajra (14 page)

If you had a CL installed, the headset talked
directly to it and presented you with a rather bogus-looking visual and aural
overlay of whatever was being sent from the other end. A good two-thirds of my
vision was suddenly taken up with a view of a man in the dark blue and
saffron-trimmed robes of an Old Way high prelate. He didn’t look much older
than me, either in terms of years or mileage, but even Old Way folks now came
from genetic lines where you could look and function pretty much the same
between the solar ages of twenty and eighty. With his heavy cheeks and tiny
eyes, he made me think he’d retreated behind a desk when he was a kid and had
never come back out again, but his smile was broad and didn’t have a single
fake thing about it.

“Mister Sim?” he asked. He sounded like he was
expecting a no.

“Mister . . . Jainio, is it?” I replied.
A few seconds’ delay, which meant we were about two to three light-seconds from
planetfall. Sufferable.

“Third Prelate Xavier Jainio, at your service.” He
bowed across the low lacquered desk in front of him; he was on cushions in a
room decorated along the same aesthetic lines as the one Angharad had received
me in on Cytheria. “I’m . . . rather at a loss for language, I’m
afraid. It’s a pleasure to speak to you, although I regret the circumstances.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine. I’m happy I was in the
right place at the right time.”

“We’ve just been getting fragmentary reports about
the failed coup on Cytheria—” (
Failed
coup, I thought. I made a note to
read the news when I got off the call.) “—and were very worried for her safety.
Her Grace has, as I imagine you know, told me about the—well, the unusual
circumstances behind her rescue, and her rescuers. So I want to emphasize, as
completely as I can, that the full weight of the Achitraka will be at your
disposal and at your defense. We are also ensuring a complete media blackout
will be in place for at least one local day.”

“Thank you; that’s very reassuring.”

“Well—”

That’s all it takes to put a knot in someone’s
stomach. One word, one pause.

“—bear in mind, there are IPS agents stationed on
Kathayagara. We make no use of their services internally, but our host world is
a full participatory body in their ranks, so they will almost certainly want to
file an incident report and question you. Given the nature of your rescue, the
. . . well, the clandestine contraband used in the effort
. . . they’re not likely to simply shrug that off.”

Stomach, meet shoes. “I take it they’ll be waiting
for us when we dock,” I said.

“Yes, I imagine so—although we’ve already listed
your vessel and crew as a diplomatic adjunct, as per Her Grace’s instructions.”

“That won’t stop them from asking us a few
friendly questions. Or asking you.”

“I am quite aware of that, yes. I have been
ordered to defer to Her Grace’s judgment in this respect. We will speak more
about this when you have made planetfall. We’ll be receiving you personally.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you.” Just you, I
thought. Not them.

I closed the connection, reheated my meal, and
sank my teeth into it instead of grinding them against each other.

In truth, I didn’t doubt for a minute whether or
not the Interplanetary Protectorate Service would get involved. With them, it
was about when, not if. The mere fact IPS was involved in something meant the
water was at your neck, not your knees. If they thought your hands were filthy—heck,
if they even thought you had too much dirt under your fingernails—they made
things difficult for you just for openers: freezing your assets, disabling your
credit, revoking your visas, blocking your CL connections, disabling your
protomic shape-access licensing.
Then
they ask if you’d like to sit down
and have a nice chat. If you’re uncooperative, you can look forward to doing a
lot of nothing. And if you are in fact one of the more rancorous specimens of
criminal life, they put an extra cherry on that cake: they put out word that
you’ve snitched on an associate, then kick you out into the street and start a
stopwatch.

The only thing between me and them was Angharad,
and I hated that.

I told
Vajra
to follow their docking beacon
and settled back into my seat with a long, deflating groan. Well, I thought, I’ve
gone and done it. Good thing my supplier of contraband had been dead for
several years; at least they won’t twist Cavafy’s arms either.

I got to perusing headlines, which were now coming
in. Unrest on Cytheria and Angharad’s disappearance was already on everyone’s
lips. No mention of the other two in her company yet, I thought, but it won’t
take long. It
had
been a while since my name had some news value.

Once upon a time, as a joke,
someone
created a “Spiritual Compliance Map” for Kathayagara. At the dead center of the
map is the Kathayan Seat, the palace / shrine / temple / autonomous nation of
the Kathaya which has changed planetary residency twice since its inception.

The Kathayan Seat is green: spiritually correct according
to the dictates of the Old Way.

The entire rest of the map is red. Including the
part marked as “space”.

The joke gets even funnier when you look at the
Spiritual Compliance Maps for the two previous worlds where the Kathayan Seat
was in residence, which also feature a single island of green in the middle of
an ocean of red.

Twice now they’ve moved for the same reason: to
take up residence on a world that “in its population and lifestyles provided a
suitable embodiment of the values of the Way”.

Such a statement wasn’t always a punchline to a
bad joke. For a couple of generations, they got what they wanted: a devoted
population, a strong example to follow. Then the tourists and pilgrims would
come flooding in, blowing out their travel quotas, inching the population cap
up year after decade after generation. The more visitors from off-world every
year, the more of an infrastructure you needed to support them—and this being
an Old Way world, you couldn’t automate that except in the most basic forms.
Your infrastructure
was
your people.

But the more people you had, the more the
infrastructure had to be relaxed to make their jobs easier lest they defect and
go somewhere more cushy and amenable to such a life. People wanted other people
to support them, not machines: history had borne that out.

So you allowed CLs—first in the most limited ways,
then broader and broader. You allowed more and wider varieties of protomics.
You joined the ranks of the worlds that had ratified the Ulan Nordol
Declaration and set commonsense enforcement policies for casual use of illegal
protomics. You watched as your kids became that much less interested in the Old
Way, except as everything from a casual fashion statement to a rebellious phase
that burned itself out before the dogwood bloomed in your final year at
college. Never as an actual Way of life.

You gave up.

Not all at once, but drop by drop, over decades
and generations—the way it’s happened across countless other worlds since we’d
all started star-hopping. Within a couple of generations the very people once
designated as a model for your spiritual home had become just as decadently “advanced”
as the rest of the bad old universe.

The only solution—in the collective mind of the Kathayan
Seat, anyway—was to let their contract expire, pull up roots, allow new
off-world enterprises to move in and fill the gap left behind by them, move
somewhere else, rename
that
world Kathayagara, and start the whole cycle
again.

Twice this had already happened, and from all the
news that had been coming out of Kathayagara since I’d been a thumb-sucker it
sounded like they were gonna go for three in my lifetime. And the news I read
as we approached orbital traffic control was all about it. A sizable share of
the Achitraka was proposing that the Kathaya
and
her council not bother
to renew their planetary lease when it next expired, and become entirely
nomadic—not tied to any one world, but taking to an extreme the way Angharad
spent more time abroad than at home.

The idea was about as popular with the rest of the
council as scouring the calluses off their feet with wire brushes. They’d gone
through enough trouble to establish a home for the Old Way, and they weren’t
about to kick themselves back out into space because of a few niggling little
problems like, oh, a starkly plummeting adherence rate. And that was all apart
from the sheer cost of enacting such a move, the years and possibly decades
involved in planning and executing said exodus, the hurt feelings on both sides,
and the logistical and technical exercise of moving two hundred thousand people—the
whole of the Seat, their families, their personal staffs, their cooks and
servants and accountants and agronomists and villages full of other “human
resources”—into a permanent spacebound arcology easily the size of Kathayagara
City or larger.

In a previous life, I thought, I might have been up
for
that
job. It all depended on what they would have offered me. But I
also knew full well every other such arcology that had come into existence had
suffered from the same problems: the vulnerability to being a tiny, frail,
spaceborne platform instead of an eminently defensible planet; the squalor and
the general unpleasantness of life in such a closed-ended environment; the fact
that the first thing most people did when they found themselves in such a place
was try to get themselves, or their kids, back out again. And I would have told
them as much. Not that they would have believed me, of course.

I looked over at Angharad
—she was in
the middle of her afternoon meditation, her face distant and calm—and decided
to ask her at some point what she thought of that whole mess, now that she’d
had experienced firsthand the dangers of being a public figure who preferred
accessibility to protection. I scarcely wanted to rub her nose in it—if
anything, I wanted nothing more than to make sure the same thing didn’t happen
again. I didn’t relish the thought of someday reading headlines like KATHAYA ASSASSINATED
IN PREDAWN LANDING PAD AMBUSH.

Enid, at the fore view, put her hands to the panel
and magnified the slowly growing view of Kathayagara’s orbital elevator dock. I’d
given her access to some of the
Vajra
’s passenger functions—touch-only,
no CL access except for the phone and only if she needed it—and she’d whiled
away the last couple of hours of our approach by peering at the dock as it came
closer. At first it was nothing more than a white thread against space’s dead black,
but up closer it was more like a necklace threaded with dozens of colored beads:
the winking amethyst of a cargo container; the gaudy polychrome of a luxury
liner; the minimally-reflective opal of an IPS mobile base of operations ship,
all lined up as they prepared to go down. Sometimes she’d put a finger to the
panel and switch to the false-color, synthetically-created tactical projection
of the view, which allowed her to rotate her vantage point and “see” the
obverse of the elevator dock. That view was patched together by the
Vajra
from feeds supplied by any number of public sensory surfaces, and when she
flicked her fingers she made the whole of the elevator spin in three dimensions
like a dizzy little child’s toy. With her forehead against the “window” and her
eyes half-lidded, she looked that much more like the kid she had for so long
made an earnest effort not to be, the kid who wanted very much for the trip to
be over so she could climb out and turn cartwheels and breathe something other
than internally-reclaimed air. I didn’t blame her.

“You see the cops?” she said after I’d been
standing next to her for a few moments. She pointed out the black pearl of the
IPS ship with its orange chevrons.

I nodded. “Ten to one those are the guys who’ll be
wringing out my scrotum as soon as we land.” I scrolled further down the queue and
stopped at what looked like a hydroponic mini-farm—some guy making his living
selling his “zero-grown” corn or rubyfruits or whatever he was raising in that
little jump-space hothouse. The green shone like cricket’s wings under the
pearly glare of the domes.

“You ever been on board one of those?” Enid had
followed my pointing fingers. “They
smell
. It’s like a kitchen in
summertime and someone hasn’t emptied the trash in months. Like one great big
rotting tomato.”

“That’s just organic composting. That’s the way
any farm smells—”

“Not like
that
it doesn’t!
I had
local farms up the road from a friend’s summer home. I know what the real thing
smells like. At least there you get actual wind and rain to clean it up every
so often. Those things—it’s like a fart in a bottle. I don’t know how those
guys manage.”

Only if you had no choice, I thought.

Out loud I said: “Same way you managed to spend—how
many years was it on the road? Cooped up in one cargo hold after another? Don’t
tell me those didn’t stink after a while, even with the best of sanitation. Or
at the very least get really boring. You can only find so many ways to waste so
much time before it hits you that you’re sitting inside a big blob of material
floating in space and there’s
nowhere else to go.
”

“This from the luxury starship maker!”

“My point exactly. Even
those
things you
could only stay cooped up in for so long. It wasn’t about the size of it, or
the comfort of your cabin. It was about knowing you were stuck there. That’s
why even the most enjoyable of those cruises tended to hit a wall after a
couple of months. Something inside all of the passengers just starts itching
like crazy for
home
.”

“What about spacebrats?”

“Well, sure—if you’re born out there in an
arcology and spend more of your time bopping around than stretching out
planetside somewhere, then yeah, you tend to take that kind of life more for
granted. But even those folks—” I shook my head. “See, I could go both ways.
One of my former co-engineers, a gravity-flux expert, he was a spacebrat. Spent
years at a time on ships—he was perfectly comfortable with it. He
liked
being cooped up. His office was barely half the size of this cabin. It was like
being back in the womb, I guess. Being planetside bugged him; he always felt
like he was going to lose his grip on the ground and go flipping up into the
sky. Or his feet would pop out of his shoes and he’d drift off along with whatever
else wasn’t nailed down . . . ”

Enid giggled through her nose at that.

“But another one I knew,” I went on, “my former PR
handler, also a spacebrat—he told me something once like, ‘The first time I
went planetside I was ten years old and I said, “This is where I was supposed
to be all along!”‘ He just
knew
the minute his foot hit the ground,
this
is home.

“So I’ve gone back and forth about it. Sometimes I
think it’s like what the Old Way’s said all along, there’s something rooted
down in the bottom of each of us that knows a planet is a home. Then I meet the
exceptions to the rule, but I don’t automatically think, ‘Naw, you people are
just kidding yourselves. Wise up and get some dirt ’tween your toes.’
 
”

Enid thought about all that, then said, “Well—then
it’s all a state of mind, then, isn’t it?”

“Except when the body speaks to the mind,”
Angharad said, “and demands to be heard, without apology.” She had gotten up
from her seat and stood behind us sometime during my babbling; I nodded at her.

“You know,” I said, “they tried engineering to fix
that sort of thing. Make people
want
space—among other things. It never
ended well. Enid, you told me before how furious you were when you realized the
fact your parents didn’t believe in backups meant you’d never be able to take
advantage of that.”

“
Ripping
furious. —But I got over it, I
guess.”

You
guess
, I thought. Out loud: “You got
over it, but imagine a whole
species
that furious. There’s no way you
can lie to that many people for so long without the truth coming out, and it
always did.”

But if you can get them to lie to themselves,
of their own volition . . .
well, that’s just what the Old Way
had tried to do, hadn’t it? I thought.

“I have always felt that much more kindly towards
those few who choose to live in space,” Angharad said. “They are the ones most
in need of a true home.”

“And you’re going to be the one to give it to them,
right?” Enid said.

“Perhaps not I, no. But I might be one to help—either
to make such places more like a world worth living in, or to make the worlds
already being lived in that much more welcome.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I checked the
clock. “Another hour or more before we head down,” I said, and brought up the
progress meter at the bottom of the panel. “There’s about . . . a
dozen other folks in line in front of us to dock and ride.”

“That is exceptionally crowded.” Angharad reached
between us and zoomed out the view, and showed me the average-traffic-load
indicator.
One hundred seventy percent?!
“I imagine the recent news
involving us has something to do with it.”

“Yeah. Journalists, pilgrims, hangers-on,
freeloaders,
cops
—”

“They’re all gonna be paying through the nose to
go planetside.” Enid sounded almost gleeful, like she was giving us an
I-told-you-so. “One time we were at Sjöwall’s World and there was major rush
traffic ‘cos of some inauguration or other. We had to shell out like
twice
the usual dock fee,
plus
the planet population quota surcharge once we
got down there. And they had a population of, what, half a billion tops? Stupid
is what it was. —I bet you they’re going to make us empty our pockets.” She pounded
her leg pouch for emphasis, making the coins in there scuff against each other.

I satisfied my curiosity and looked up the current
fee schedule.
Due to exceptionally high landing demand at the current time, the
conventional fee schedule has been suspended. Fees are currently being assessed
on a case-by-case basis. Use the following guide to create a projection for
your craft . . . please note this guide is not a substitute for an
official fee quoted by the Kathayagara Port Authority . . .

“Wait. Does this even apply to us?” I looked at
Angharad. “I’d think for you at least they would waive the docking fee—right?”