Flight of the Vajra (2 page)

You see how it is? I thought. You make an excuse
for coming out here to ponder this by yourself, and now all you can think about
is going back in. Probably for the best.

Just then, through the floor, and then through the
outward-facing bulkhead my hand was resting on, I felt tremors I didn’t
recognize.

I knew how the
Kyritan
was supposed to
feel—not just from the simulations or the full-sensory CL-feed immersions I’d
run, but from having ridden in the damn thing for countless days and weeks as
it was being assembled. This wasn’t the smoothly rising and falling oscillation
of a compartment refactoring itself, or a bulkhead realigning. This was chaos.

I gave Cavafy a shout by CL and had my signal
bluntly rejected. I didn’t have time to finish wondering why in the cosm’s name
he would be turning off inbound connections before the ceiling and floor and
walls began to all peel away from each other.

The entire corridor was tearing open, as if the
different layers of the ship’s infrastructure had all decided to walk off in
separate directions. The floor yanked itself around for a few dozen centimeters
in all directions before the flooring, made of tuned-to-transparent Type B
substrate (emulates heavier plastics and thin metals), splintered. Air screamed
out around me and threatened to freeze-dry my eyes right in their sockets.

I shut my eyes and threw myself at the nearest
inward-facing bulkhead. I’d tried to patch into the ship’s sensory surfaces via
CL, and see what was around me through the ship’s own eyes instead of mine, but
nothing came back. If I wanted to climb into a rescue pod, I’d have to do it by
touch alone, and I had mere seconds to do it before my blood boiled and I
passed out.

My fingers groped and closed around the handles
set into the walls. Normally they were hidden, but despite everything that was
going wrong, the emergency depressurization routines at least seemed to have
triggered. I remembered the one very boring night I’d spent deploying all that
code into most every bulkhead in the ship, reminding myself this might well
save someone’s life in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Now all I could think,
as I yanked myself along from one handle to the next, was:
Please don’t let
it be just me that’s saved. Please don’t let it be just me.

The fifth handle I reached was larger than the
rest and had a familiar trigger set into the underside. Next to it was the
rounded edge of a doorway that hadn’t existed before. I hauled myself around
and bailed forward into the hatch, right on top of four other warm bodies. I opened
my eyes, blinked the mist out of them, and saw vaguely familiar faces: the
gender-mutable who had been playing cello the other night; another ’mute who
was most likely that one’s lover; the director of technological services for
the company; a teenaged girl who had been in the pool and was still wearing
only a slightly damp one-piece bathing suit, her teeth chattering.

We were thrown to the floor in a
newly-disorganized pile as the pod lurched and we were blown free. I didn’t
strap myself in like everyone else; I scrambled up to the one porthole in the
top of the pod and clung to the handles on either side of it, staring back up at
what was left of the
Kyritan.

Like a glass peapod split up the middle, I
thought. A hailstorm of glittering shards spewed outwards from the two
remaining husks of the hull.

I connected to the CL mesh network that I knew would
have been established between the escape pods and hunted frantically for the
only three names that mattered. I was still searching for them long after the
last icy remnants of the
Kyritan
had passed from view, and even longer
after I knew full well all hope would have to be laid to rest.

And then one fine day, five solar years later—

There were two circuses in town
shortly
after I arrived on Cytheria. Well, only one of them
called
itself a
circus.

The fact they were in town was a bonus. I hadn’t been
on a tourist-visa waitlist for a month to come to Cytheria for a circus. I was
there just to rock back on my heels somewhere where drinks were cheap and the
ocean breeze had soaked itself into the curtains over your hotel room window,
and you didn’t have to worry about what was coming through (or going out of)
your cortical link.

It’s a fairly hardline Old Way world, Cytheria, so
I’d been politely asked to deactivate most everything I was wearing or
harboring when I touched down. I suspect a good half of the tourists who come
through bitch endlessly about locking their clothes into a single pattern or—horrors—turning
off their CL. It wasn’t like I would use the latter a whole lot down there, on
a world where the only people sporting CLs in the first place were the tourists
who came here mostly to turn theirs off in the first place. And it wasn’t like
I couldn’t stand to wear some clothes that might actually need to be changed
for real once in a while. I’d been born on an Old Way world relaxed enough to
allow things like CLs and protomic clothing, albeit little beyond that.

That was the whole point of being Old Way: you
still had dirt between your toes, so to speak. Not only that, but you knew the
value of getting that dirt in there to begin with.

The customs inspector who debriefed me started his
whole patter about disabling CLs right as I was stepping out of the lock for my
ship—he was running a scan on me, and halfway through his speech he stopped and
said, “Oh, good, you’ve already turned off your CL. And I see your clothes have
also been locked down . . . good, good.”

I gave him a shrug and a smile. “Friends of mine
gave me the drill before I came planetside.”

“Well, I see that the hull of your ship is also a
protomic construct. We’ll need to—”

“Absolutely. Take your time,” I said, with as much
cheer as I could simulate, and sat down in the little vestibule opposite his
desk. He needed to make sure I wasn’t smuggling anything in a suspension
lattice, or that the hull was capable of being transmuted into weaponry, or any
of the dozen-hundred other paranoias that come courtesy of protomics. Not that
he was really capable of preventing any of that from happening; he just wanted
to say he’d done his job, and I just wanted to pass his inspection without
having to grease his hands. Cytheria was like most Old Way worlds: if you did
shady business, the only thing stopping you from coming planetside was a
slightly stiffer bribe and maybe some friendly favors on the way back out. I’d
known this going in, but I’d decided to just be a tourist this time.

He paused before entering the ship, and I wanted
to believe that was so he could admire what I’d made: two closely-fused spheres
which revolved together to provide 1G emulation, surrounded by a ring that was
actually a pair of crescents fused at the horns. The skin of the ship was gold
and red patterns over lacquer black.
Vajra,
I called her. It had taken
me years to come up with a design where I couldn’t think of anything else to
take away.

I counted floor panels and got up to thirty-eight
before he, too, came back smiling and approved my visa.

“Welcome to Cytheria. Enjoy your stay!”

“Already am.”

I almost felt bad for the guy. If he
really
had been able to tell what the hull and my clothes and a few other things were
made of, he would have had one amazing story to tell his grandkids. There’s
protomics, and then there’s . . .
protomics.
Such as Cavafy’s
gift, from which my ship had been spawned, and which most definitely fit into the
second category.

But by that point I’d gotten good at hiding things
from most everyone. To this man I was just plain old Henré Sim, former
protomics-systems engineer and ship designer. Alleged reason for travel:
pleasure. Real reason for travel: not telling.

Septimus’s Great Sky Theater: A Panopoly of
Aerodromic Gyrotoma
read the posters. Just under that wooly title,
a spiky tangle of what looked like drastically-modified low-altitude craft
(possibly even unmanned drones) swirled like a fresh summer cloud of
butterflies. At the bottom, a slender, moon-faced girl in a single-piece
leotard—white chased here and there with red, like strategically-applied body
paint—stood with toes wrapped across a high wire. Her hair, and she had a lot
of it to show off, was also white, with its own share of red at the roots and
tips. The show was tomorrow evening at the docks. Free admission. Evidently
they made their keep either by being paid by the town government to draw
business, or by selling souvenirs, or both.

I’d come planetside only a couple of days before
said Great Sky Theater of Whatever was supposed to do its thing, and the
posters had already mottled most every wall throughout the crumbling maze of
streets near the wharf. Sometimes they popped up underfoot on the sidewalks,
five abreast all the way to the curb. They’d been spot-sprayed using the same
protomic pigment used for any number of other ads. Each ink droplet was its own
little machine for soaking up light and re-radiating it back out in
pre-programmed patterns. In a few days, the weathering of feet and wheels and,
well, weather itself would dull all those spirited colors and turn those
swirling letters into broken hieroglyphs. A day after that, what was left would
quietly melt away of its own accord—silicon, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all
mixing effortlessly with the rain like sugar melting in your tea. By that time,
Septimus and
Cie
. would have long since packed up and poofed offworld.

The engineer part of me, which was buried deep
inside but still came out from time to time, emerged and had its bitter laugh
for the day. The same protomics, the same microscopic-machine protean-matter
technology used to create everything from self-reconfiguring starship hulls to
replacement body parts to the very suit I wore, was also used to plaster
advertising across any available flat surface.

At least the rain’ll wash it off, I thought. But
only because it was designed to let that happen.

I stood at the corner of the cobblestoned,
sharply-rising street where I’d rented a room for the week. On a relatively
staid little Old Way world like this, they made most of their money by spinning
all kinds of house variations on the game of Skinflint the Tourist. The fee for
getting on the planet’s waitlist was bad enough; the fee for actually visiting
Port Cytheria itself was pure extortion. If you wanted to get in and out of
your own ship while it was parked in their docks, you had to pay an “access fee”
that was only slightly less than what it cost to rent a damn room in the first
place. That was on top of the “docking fee” and the “orbital approach fee”.
They had no orbital dock here (few did), and no orbital elevator, either—in
fact, they
prided
themselves on not having those things, proving once
again people were willing to pay for extra hassle that sported the pretense of
being classy. Even only a few of the highest of Highend worlds had no elevator,
either; most still kept just one as a token gesture to the rest of the lowly
universe.

So I’d stuck the
Vajra
in one of the
seaside niches, a few kilometers south of this place by rail, and decided to
take the week off. Not that I wasn’t already “off”; for the last five years I’d
listed myself as having no income apart from various interest and capital-gains
earnings on my savings and investments.

But it wasn’t like I was doing
nothing.
I
had a mission of my own; I just knew better than to talk about it.

Port Cytheria is all sloping roofs and twisting
stony streets leading up and down a hillside towards the water. The sun sets
right over it and those two little moons that kick up such interesting
cross-tides transit the sky at least twice during the day. Awnings flap and
flash in gold and brown; pennants and streamers hang down from third-story
windows and advertise the cafés and restaurants in red and green. You stand in
doorways and you smell tracked-in street dust, locally-hybridized peppers drying
on a string just over your head, fresh-cut flowers wet and cold. People smile
at you with their head down a little bit, as if they’re inviting you to be in
on a secret. You could almost believe it wasn’t all by design.

Those who come here from lives on more upscale
worlds always have trouble discovering how efficiently the liquor gets you good
and drunk (and gives you honest-to-god hangovers) or how everything from the
meat on their grill to the tomato in their salad sports flavors so fierce they
can barely chew any of it. Many of them beat a safe retreat back to whatever
soggy, limp excuses for a meal can be found back at home, and only venture out
to Cytheria or the like as a way to jolt themselves. They don’t live like this—and
they don’t
want
to—so they only come here for the thrill of being able
to get away from it after a few days. They would rather leave the experience of
living
here to those unlucky enough (in their mind) to be born here in a
place that chose to live as little as possible with CLs and most kinds of
protomics and with population controls (a
planet
of barely two hundred
fifty
million
? Are you
kidding?
) that are best described as
. . . well, religiously strict. No prizes for guessing which
religion.

Because despite all that, up and down all those
streets in Port Cytheria are more kids than you’ve ever seen in your life,
especially if you’re from a higher-end world. Look at ‘em—running barefoot or
thin-sandaled, punting balls or waving homemade eight-bladed windbreakers. It
didn’t matter that a good chunk of them would emigrate offworld by the time
they were eighteen, most of them to worlds where the Old Way was less devoutly
observed—or not observed at all—where they could get a CL and wrap themselves
in protomics and forget that much more about being Old Way human. But plenty
still stay behind, because it’s all they know, and they find something here in
the Old Way that they can’t find anywhere else. Some leave, find that out after
breaking their knuckles for a few years working for people who barely even see
them as sentient, and they come on back wondering what they ever saw in leaving
behind home cooking. And many more crowd in here on the sly, paying off the
locals to look the other way and not report them on the planet’s census. Those
two hundred fifty million are only the
official
numbers, and the time
was fast approaching when the official numbers wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone.

All the same, Old Way worlds are crowded with the
young; they’re the only place left in the whole galaxy to find the young ones anymore.

I should know; I’d had a kid myself, once. But I’d grown
skilled at thinking less about it.

The harbor was only four blocks away,
already soaked in sunset. Part of me wished it had been further off—I wanted to
stretch my legs a little more—so I cheated and picked as circuitous a route as
I could find from the map that had been left in my hotel room. No CL headmaps
here; you used your eyes and your whole brain. For some people this was as
nasty as camping out without nothing to wipe down with.

I was still in my favorite outfit—white suit, snappy
Panama hat, mutable wraparound shades (because sometimes you just wanted to
hide your eyes)—and I’d gotten into the habit of letting my hair get long after
my retirement. I could tame it any number of ways, or even get rid of it
entirely and get protomic implants, but in the end I’d just put it in dreads
and kept it oiled. By itself it wouldn’t make people think me that much more a
dropout, but it was one of the many small ways I served notice I wasn’t the
Henré Sim of before. My two-meter frame and broad shoulders were a bit stooped
over and hollowed out now. But all the things Biann had liked in me—the big
brow, the big jaw (and the big smile to go with it), and the maybe-too-big
nose—all those hadn’t gone anywhere.

No sense denying it: there
was
some part of
me that was still a little vain, still a little bit thirsty for some spotlight
time, wherever I could find it. Maybe that was why I wandered over to see the
Sky Theater Etcetera—to see someone else in the spotlight, and imagine how they
dealt with it.

Behind the breakwater wall at the beach were
bleachers eight and ten steps high. Any seat in the house was a good one; the
sun and the sea filled your vision. Right overhead, a single vertical smear of
cloud was shot through with sunset. The hills behind me were too steep to see
the first stars coming out, but both moons were wandering around overhead, pale
and tiny. And crowds of people were sitting or standing all around me—men in
coveralls, women in flimsy summer dresses, boys and girls riding on shoulders.
Two men at my feet, similar enough to each other to be brothers, with their
curly black hair and protruding ears, undid the seal on a bottle of beer nearly
as tall as my forearm was long, and filled a pair of knobby green glasses. They
offered me the rest of the bottle, about a third left. I took it with thanks
and soon its heavy, nutty flavor was swirling around in both my stomach and my
head. Not too fast, now, I warned myself, and sat down with the bottle clasped
between my knees.

Applause and whooping burst out around me. I
looked up from fumbling with the bottle cap.

There she was.

The way she had been depicted on the poster wasn’t
too far from the truth. She had the same waterfall of white hair, the same
bodysuit—but I saw now that her suit was in fact tricked out with a sensor
array, with the red chasings not just for decoration. Whatever it is she was
going to do, they wanted to show she could use only her body to do it, that no
CL trickery was needed. Not that she would have been able to use a CL here in
the first place, but . . .