Flight of the Vajra (20 page)

Two solar years later we were married. Seven solar
years later Yezmé was born. Four solar years after that—

Where’s that rising star now? I thought. Flared,
burned out, now in the brown dwarf stage and smoldering away. Or, that sun’s
not all the way down, but it sure is getting dark out.

But even dying stars still shine, don’t they? I
told myself.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” I said to my hosts,
and stood up. They didn’t object.

Sometime during the conversation Enid had headed
back inside. She was now seated crosslegged on one of the queen-sized beds,
between which had been extruded a divider (currently de-opacified) that split
the room temporarily into two for us. The left sleeve of her outfit didn’t
match the rest of it—she’d turned the sleeve into something filmy and floating,
long enough to either drag on the floor or trail in the air behind her when she
walked. She gave it a flip this way and a snap that way, frowning at it each
time.

“Not happy with the way it falls?” I said.

“This design looks better on me when I’m actually
doing
something in it.” She raised her arm all the way up and let the trailing bits
of it cling to her arm and meld themselves together. “If I’m just standing
there or even walking, it only looks like so much see-through seaweed. I look
like something that got washed ashore, or puked out of a whale or something.”

I smothered my laugh, but not completely. “So you
designed that yourself?”

“This, and some other bits and pieces. One of my
friends in the circus, Jiriny, she designed outfits for everyone in the whole
thing. The thing I usually wear, that’s hers. It’s actually a stock gymnast’s
bodysuit with some mods and color I asked for.”

“Hold that back up,” I said.

She obeyed; I ran my fingers through the hanging
sleeve and watched the way it fell. “There’s enough material here that if you
were doing something where you were moving slowly—really slowly, Tai Chi
slow—you could have something displayed on those. It’s not hard to add a mod to
turn those into displays—maybe the other half of the story you’re telling, so
to speak.”

She held her arm out and slid the sleeve across
her own face, eyes closed. “I could do this,” she said, “and over my face you’d
see another face . . . And it would be about the two of us, somehow,
the real face and the projected one.” She reopened her eyes. “That’s all I’ve
got for that for now, though.”

“You ever thought about designing your own outfits?
For others, I mean?”

“I have, but . . . every time I sit down
and actually think about what’s involved, it always seems like there’s so much
more to it than I can wrap my head around at once.”

“It’s not
that
tough. It’s no tougher than
anything else you learn by doing. You think I came out of the chute designing
ships? I hung out with the right people, picked it up by taking their work
apart. With their consent, of course.”

“Don’t you need to know protomic programming, even
for just doing clothing?”

I smiled. “You know what protomic programming is?
A dialect. You want to know how to survive in the alleys, you learn how to talk
to the alley-cats. You want to live with the spacebrats, you listen to them
speaking spacebrat. And if you want to create with protomics, you gotta learn
how to listen to it and talk to it. But if you’re hesitant more because you’d rather
spend your time doing
other
things than looking at stack traces and loop
filters, sure.”

“See—I’d
like
to know, but it always sounds
like so much work just to make something I could go get off someone else’s rack
. . . ‘Sides, I already make stuff. Like this.” She stretched out her
arms and slowly rose, standing on the bed in a one-footed “scarecrow” pose. “If
I’m going to be
making
anything, it’s new performances. I just have to
find a place where there’s an audience. After all that running around, I’m
thinking about just picking a spot and sticking with it.”

“At least for a few months at a time.”

“Naw, I’m sick of spacebratting. No offense to you.
I mean, I like being with you ‘cos you’re never boring.”

“Yes, but I get into trouble.” Here we go again, I
thought.

“Sure, but you think I don’t know about trouble? I’m
not
helpless
, you know.”

 “I’d rather it didn’t come to that if we can help
it. If something goes down and you can get behind me—” I leaned in. “—
get your
ass behind me
. I mean it.”

“You don’t think I can handle myself?”

“Let’s just not tempt fate, that’s all.”

“How about this—how about you give me some of
those protomic enhancements of yours? It’s not like I couldn’t use ‘em as well.”

I tilted a head at the door. “I think
they’d
be a little peeved if I did that.”

“Oh, what are you worried about! You don’t even like
them either.”

“No, I don’t like them, but right now they’ve got
something I want, don’t forget that. The less reason I give them to fold their
papers and walk, the better.”

That just made her hunt all the harder for a
loophole. Her brows crunched against each other. “Look. They said, and I was
there for this, that they’re not into busting you for that stuff. If it comes
in handy and saves either of our skins, are they really going to make that big
a stink about it?”

Point. I stalled for time by extruding a water
glass from the wall niche and wetting my throat with it.

“You said so yourse-elf . . . ” she
sing-songed. “They’re not into bus-ting yo-ou . . . ”

She made me cackle hard enough to launch spit
bubbles, damn her. “Ask me again in the morning? Now is not the time for me to
be making any decisions more crucial than which side of the bed I sleep on.”

“Oh, all
right.
”

If nothing else, we were getting good at chiding
each other and getting away with it. All the friendships I’d ever had included
at least a little of that, but it was never something that germinated too
quickly. I’d barely known her for two days and we were already ribbing away,
but I didn’t want to read too deeply into that. There was nothing that said
tomorrow she wouldn’t be storming out of here with those few coins in her
pocket. I had gotten plenty used to being abandoned.

Abandoned? I asked myself. Or is it just that you
do the walking-out all the more easily now?

And even if I had only known her for a couple of
days, I was already sure I’d regret turning my back on her.

The room had a hamper in one wall, and from it
Enid took out a set of unisex sleepwear. A protomic suit could serve equally
well as a dressing gown or a wedding dress; it was all about the configuration,
not the material. But there was something about dressing specifically for bed—the
act of doing it, the feel of something against you that wasn’t fetid with your
body heat—that was still relaxing. I was the same way, although I didn’t put my
own clothes in the hamper to recharge. With all the crazy programming I’d
loaded into my suit, I had my doubts if it would come back out of there at all.
I’d already rejuvenated most of what I was wearing during our time on the
Vajra
,
so it ought to last me at least a good ten days or so.

I opacified the divider, stepped behind it, set
the window to
private, opaque (time-delayed)
and lay on my side facing
it. City lights were a nice thing to fall asleep to—real city lights, something
you could see for yourself if you went out the door and walked a few steps.

“Hey, Henré?” Enid murmured from her bed. My
mistake: I’d attuned the divider to block light but not noise. I thought about
fixing that but decided to reply first.

“Hm?”

“Are you scared of what you’ll find out? About
your family, I mean.”

“All the time,” I said, half into the pillow.

“Is it really that bad?”

“It is, but . . . ” I turned to face
her, if only to make myself heard all the better. “Enid, I tell you—I don’t
want to do this. I never wanted to do any of this, really. I wanted to take the
money I was given and go home and stick my head in any of the different kinds
of sand they’ve got for someone to bury themselves in these days. But I knew if
I didn’t get my ass out into space and try to find an answer, I’d be in the
kind of pain I couldn’t smother except by snuffing myself all the way out. I
don’t
want
to know what happened, but . . . I know if I don’t
want it, the alternatives are so much worse.”

Silence.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to get my dad
back,” Enid said, her voice also blunted by the pillows, “but I just want to go
and find out if that chance even exists. And . . . well, it’s like
you said. I’m not even sure I want just that. I could run off, do all kinds of
other things. I haven’t stopped making those plans. You’ve seen that.”

“You just want an answer,” I said slowly, “that
isn’t something you yourself made up.”

“Yeah. An answer from the universe. You said, you
don’t make bargains with the universe. But maybe you can at least get it to say
something once in a while?”

“Maybe. For the things that really matter.”

Long pause, then: “How do you know who really
matters?”

“I always thought it was self-evident. You know
who matters to you, right? You don’t have to think about it very hard. You
close your eyes; you see their faces . . . ”

She didn’t respond, but I heard her breathing, and
maybe even a faint chuckle of a snore, too.

The opacity of the window had begun to increase. I
shut my eyes and darkened everything in the room all the way.

Behind my own closed eyes
I saw a wide
set of stairs leading down into a basement. Familiar stairs, familiar basement.
I was dreaming and remembering at the same time, and I could see how the dream
and the memory were bleeding into and then out of each other.

Enno Cavafy led me down the stairs into the giant
basement below his house—now my house—a basement that stretched out for dozens
of meters in all directions. A laboratory; a vault; a hangar. All of these
things at once.

The far end of the giant room opened out into the
side of the hill the house itself was built on. My shades automatically tinted
themselves to dial down the afternoon sun as the wall at that end receded, and
out from the glare I could see two roughly human silhouettes—one large, one
small—undulating towards me and sending out echoes of footfalls.

“I know you’ve been down here before.” Cavafy
gestured around-and-about. “But I also know I’ve never shown you what the real
function of this place was. I had the occasional dunester parked in here for
tearing up the hillsides, but that was all for show.
This
is the real
work.”

At the far end of the room, their features
emerging from the haze of the light as they stepped in closer, Yezmé and Biann
waved at me. I waved back.

“The view from out there is unbelievable!” Biann
called out. “Why aren’t
we
living here?”

Someday, I thought, I will be. But it’ll only be
me, alone.

From the floor of the room rose five cylinders big
enough to hold a man if he crouched down, each marked with the universal
symbols for the five basic classes of protomics: three wavy lines, three
straight lines, square, circle, triangle. Cavafy strolled towards them, keeping
his face to me—he was smiling, big and loose, a smile that said he was about to
give away all the secrets at once.

“My gift to you,” he said at last. “All unlocked,
of course.”

“So
this
is the ‘belated anniversary gift’
he was going on about, hm?” Biann was sizing up my reaction to the containers,
like I’d been caught ogling another woman. “Or are you going to say—”

“—that it’s as big a surprise to me as it is to
you?” I shook my head. “’Fraid I can’t use that alibi, m’dear.”

“Don’t you already have enough toys?”

I stepped in closer to her. “Who said these toys
were going to be just for me?”

“Oh, well, in
that
case!” She put her arms
across my shoulders and drew me in, and while I wasn’t looking because Biann was
pressing her forehead against mine, Yezmé climbed up on the cylinder labeled
C
.

Cavafy moved before I did: he reached over, lifted
her off, and placed her on the floor. “Can’t go climbing up on those, sweetie.”

“But he said
toys
!” Yezmé gushed.

Biann shook her head. “
Down
, kiddo.”

“Oh, let her fool around,” I laughed. “She’s not
going to be able to break anything in here.”

“There’s a lot more than just these five, you
know,” Cavafy said. “A
lot
more. Enough toys to keep a whole brood of
Sims busy for generations.”

Yezmé scampered back up on top of the cylinder,
right as Cavafy slapped his hand down atop the cylinder at the far left. “First,”
he said, “Type A. Emulates fabric, cloth, paper, and lighter plastics. Fully
tunable opacity and conductivity.”

“I bet the forty-hour days down here mess some
people up,” Biann murmured, “but have you ever just basked in it? You lie there
on the hillside for a whole lazy afternoon, and the sun hasn’t moved a bit
. . . it’s like you have a whole long weekend of Sunday afternoons.”
I felt her hair tickle the edge of my ear and her hands come to rest right
above my shoulder blades.

“Type B.” Cavafy touched the second container.
“Emulates heavier plastics to thin metals.” He snapped his fingers at me.
“Henré, are you listening?”

“I hear you,” I said past my wife’s ear. “You know
me, I don’t fall asleep in class.”

“Type C.” Cavafy gave the third cylinder a knock
with his knuckles, as Yezmé was still sitting on it and dangling her legs.
“Emulates most metals, again with fully tunable transparency and conductivity.
But you’ve got to be careful when you start getting up into this end of the
spectrum, Henré, because the higher Mohs-scale stuff gains back its tensillary
strength and hardness at the expense of power consumption, morphic speed and
plasticity cycles. You can’t get something for nothing.”