Flight of the Vajra (21 page)

His words were not just Cavafy’s anymore; they
were my professor’s words, sometimes even my own words to myself. But those
last words—

You can’t get something for nothing
, Dad
had said once, holding out to me in his hand the dead redbird he’d rescued from
the edge of the porch.
Even the tiniest of lives like this comes with a
cost. No matter how you bring something into the world, whether it’s just a
word from your mouth or it’s a baby in a crib, you’re responsible for it.

Cavafy lifted the lid on the fourth cylinder.
“Type D, Henré. Emulates liquids and gels. Very short half-life, so don’t use
this for applications where there are no long-term rejuvenative prospects. This
is for small-scale, one-shot stuff. Or something where you expect relatively
easy access to reloads or recharges on the part of the user. Don’t expect any
of it to last.”

His last words, Dad’s words as well.

“Type E, Henré. Type E has the full range of
hardnesses, the full range of electrochemical properties, phase transitions,
all of it. But it has one limitation: you can only initiate
one
reaction
with any given amount of it. One single, full-fledged property change,
typically with a lot of exothermics. Use this stuff only when nothing else will
do. And use it wisely. Here, there are no second chances.

“Remember,” Cavafy said in more than one voice,
“protomics is all about tradeoffs. You can trade morphic speed for hardness or
vice versa. Or you can trade the overall lifetime of the material without
rejuvenation or recharge for either one of those things. Or you can trade speed
of morph for the risk of converting substrate to inert slag. You’re
always
going to be giving something up.”

Those last few words, though—those had been
completely his. How many times had he said them to me, in the context of a
conversation about this very subject?

He lowered the lid on the fifth container. Yezmé
slid off her perch and with a squeal tackled both Biann and I around the upper
thighs.

“Easy!” Biann warned. “One of these days you’re
going to tornado yourself through a wall, you know that?”

“Biann, please,” I said. “If she can’t do that
when she’s this old, what’s the point?”

Yezmé gave another cackle and bounded up and down
in place.

“You always loved her so much,” my wife whispered,
her lips suddenly near my ear again. “You always let her do whatever she
wanted. And you didn’t think that would be a problem, that she might figure out
how to play us off each other—”

“No. She never got that far.”

You liar, I thought. She did it all the time.
Didn’t make her a bad girl, though.

“She never did play us off each other.” Biann
shook her head, only too happy to agree with my lie. “Not for anything
important, anyway. Because she was always trying to make you happy in
everything she did. Maybe that was it . . . that she always had you
to go to for something to make her happy, even if it wasn’t the thing she
wanted just then . . . ”

“What’re you gonna make, Dad?” Yezmé called up to
me, from under the crook of Biann’s arm. “More ships, right?”

Somehow, even with her beaming like that, I
couldn’t keep the smile I’d just had.

From over Biann’s shoulder, I saw Cavafy with his
arms folded, leaning back on the last canister. At least a third of my grade
depends on my answer, I thought.

“I think it’s going to be something a bit bigger
than that,” I said.

Biann was amused. “What could be bigger than
that?”

“I don’t know,” I went on, and turned the two of
us in place so that I wouldn’t have to look back into Cavafy’s eyes as I spoke.
“There were other ships like mine before I came along, weren’t there?”

“None of them done better than yours—”

Biann clearly had more to say, but I’d heard those
words before—too many times, and not just from her either.

“It’s not good enough just to improve on what’s
already there,” I said, seeing unease enter Biann’s face. “Because then all you
get is the same thing in a nicer package! All you get is an excuse to repeat
yourself, and I don’t . . . want to give people just that anymore. I
want more than—
just this
.”

It was out of me before I realized I’d even said
it. All the things I had never been able to say to the real her had flooded
out.

Biann’s mouth tightened shut hard enough to make
an angry line ripple up her jaw. The last time I’d seen something like that was
in the second before the one time in both our lives she’d slapped me.

“So, then—” Biann reached down and drew Yezmé
closer to her as she stepped back. “So ‘just this’—that includes us, too?”

“No, no—”

Because I want more than “just this” for all of
us too,
I tried to say, but she was speaking first.

“Henré.” This is how such things started with her,
I thought: just my name, spoken dead and cold. “You remember when we were first
getting married . . . and how I told you I was getting rid of my
backups because you’d never had one? You tried to talk me out of it, and dammit,
you almost did, too.” A pained smile came and went. “But I wore you down. And
then you said, ‘All right, but two things.’ You remember what those two were,
don’t you?”

“I remember.”

“Well, what
were
they, then!”

“That we were going to raise our girl so that she
would live well enough never to want them in the first place—”

Which had been a big part of what the Old Way
asked of anyone. An effort as wide as life and as hard as anything it could
saddle you with, but worth it in the end—at least as long as you kept an ikon
of the Kathaya in your house. Small wonder I had thrown mine away.

“
And
?”

And now the real fury’s coming, I thought, the
fury she might well have had for me if she had lived only to find her daughter
had not.

“And that I would do everything I could,” I said,
through an increasingly uncooperative mouth, “to make sure, until she was
grown, that she would never need one . . .”

“She and me, both!”

Damn you, I
did
do everything I could.
How many times had I checked everything? How many possibilities had I
exhausted?

Her arm crooked around Yezmé, Biann took three
full steps back from me, to where the drums now stood between us. Cavafy stood
in my way before I could close the distance, but I put both hands on him and
shoved him to one side.

“You remember that, don’t you?” Her bitterness had
bloomed into a full-on taunt. “You at least remember
that
!”

“
Of course I remember that
,” and with that
shout I reached out to seize both her arm and Yezmé’s. Both arms broke off at
the shoulder, where the stumps sprouted the bristly
sheet-mica-and-crystal-bismuth look of protomic structures. I would have cried
out again, but all that came out was a whisper that was muffled by my pillow as
I saw the near wall of the hotel room, splashed from one side with morning
light.

My arm dangled over the side of the bed
,
and from the underside of my pillow came the low thrumming of a wake-up alarm.
I could have elected to patch the signal directly into my CL, but I hadn’t
bothered. For me there was always going to be something creepy about a sound
that only I could hear.

Cavafy had been right—both in my dream and in real
life.
You’re the most restless, dissatisfied person I’ve ever known,
he’d
told me once.
I think that’s why I like you so much. You’re always looking for
the something more you know is there, even if no one else does.

Ambition. Restlessness. A seeking soul. The doctor
who profiled me after the accident had other words for it, like
control-freakisheness and paranoia and self-loathing.

Who do you trust: your smiling dead friend, or the
countless living around you who have nothing you want to hear?

I decided it was too early in the morning to make
such a momentous decision and pushed myself out of bed feet-first.

Enid was awake and sitting up by the time I emerged
from the shower, damper but that much more alert, She’d retracted the divider
as well. Why not; it wasn’t like our hosts didn’t also have access to the
sensory surfaces in the room to see what was going on anyway. She’d unraveled
the sheet of MemoCel and spread it across her knees, watching what I took to be
the news. I craned my neck and saw—oh good grief, it was
us
. Snatches of
us from various surveillance surfaces, making our escape from Cytheria with Angharad
in tow, unspooled in a dozen tiny jittering mosaics.

“News blackout, my unshaven
ass
,” I
cackled. “Well, so much for conducting our little mission incognito. What’re
they saying?”

Enid looked up at me, a lot more placidly than I
thought she would. “Just that we came planetside in her company, that’s all. Or
rather,
she
came planetside in
our
company.”

“Well, that’s bad enough right there! Like I said,
so much for doing this hush-hush.”
Kallhander,
I CLed,
are you seeing
this?
It disgusted me that I could slide back into such old habits so easily,
but I had the feeling I would need to get back into the habit real fast.

—I am,
he replied immediately
.
Apparently the news about your arrival was conjecture, since most of their hard
evidence was about your activities on Cytheria, but I suspect there has been a
leak after all. We had put an outside time limit estimate of forty-one hours
before a leak, but it appears someone was able to beat that estimate by quite a
margin.

—Which is a nice way of saying your estimate
sucks, doesn’t it? Did your guys finish talking to Angharad yet?

—Ioné is performing the second phase of the
debriefing with her now. As far as our estimates go, they’re just that:
estimates. They can always be revised.

Nice loophole. I cut the link before I got too
wrapped up in it, and set about opening up the breakfast niche.

The worst part about CL is how you can talk with
someone for what feels like hours, only to realize it’s been fifteen minutes.
You’re then relieved that you’re not wasting your whole day, so you go back to
talking for what feels like hours (again, fifteen minutes). And so on, back and
forth until you finally
do
blow your whole day yacking and feel like you’ve
spent a week instead. But when your average lifespan is a hundred and change on
even some Old Way worlds, few people complain.

“So what’s the plan?” Enid said around her corn
muffin.

“I have an idea, not a plan.”

“Hey. A girl can dream, can’t she?”

“True enough. —Okay, the plan, such as it is: Get
back in touch with Angharad after they finish grilling her, compare notes with
her. Get Kallhander to cough up his part of the deal. After that
. . . assuming they
let
us, I say we get out of this bolt-hole
and go somewhere a little more, you know, open-ended? —And now that I think
about it, I have
exactly
the place in mind. In fact, it ought to be right
up your own alley.”

“Oh
really
now. Care to tell me about it?”
The way she smiled, she looked like she was daring me to answer.

“It’s a performance space, owned by a
. . . well, I was going to say ‘friend’, but I’m not sure she thinks
of
me
that way anymore. I’m hoping I can turn that around. It’s been a
few years since she chewed my ear, so I hope she’s cooled off since.”

“Was there a fight?”

“It . . . wasn’t any one thing.”

Except that I knew perfectly well it was indeed
any one thing. It was about the fact that I’d taken money and gone home and
shut my mouth, and someone who had expected me to never, ever do anything that
cynical turned their back on me once and for all. What was I supposed to have
done, tell that person it was stupid to expect anyone to be your own
custom-built hero? Even I wasn’t that cynical—well, not cynical enough to
say
it, but certainly cynical enough to believe it on my own.

I distracted myself from that tarpit of a thought by
putting in another call to Angharad’s office. Same canned response as before. I
was about to bury myself in yet another session of mulching around with the
data dump Kallhander had given me when I felt the little tickle of someone
trying to CL me—no, not just “someone”,
Angharad.
The originating node
matched the contact info she’d given me earlier.

—Mr. Sim?

—The one and only, unless someone’s cheating.

—Mr. Sim! It’s so good to hear from you again.
I am sorry I was unable to return your earlier communications, but I was being
debriefed. It was rather puzzling. An inordinate amount of time being asked
about a great many trivial details.

—That sounds familiar. Did they flash pictures
at you of people you didn’t know?

—They did. Now, I wanted to ask if you could
spare some time to speak to me in person, about a matter I have been mulling
over since we left Cytheria. You’re welcome to bring Enid if she wishes to come—that
is, if she is still in your company, since this ostensibly affects her as well.

—She’s still here—about a meter or so to my
left, actually. Practicing her plies, from the look of it. If this is about her
father, I
know
she’ll want to hear it.

—It is. And about a great deal more besides.
These last few days have helped confirm for me something that I have allowed to
go undecided for far too long.

Always funny how much weight you can sense behind
and between someone’s words, even when there’s any number of filtering
mechanisms between the two of you. When all those years ago the lawyer from
Exoluft said to me he wanted to discuss
my future
with them, I knew
right then and there he was talking about my
lack
of a future with them.

Angharad’s plan was simple: we were to join her
for lunch at Achitraka House, Kathayagara City. She sent over an access token
with directions and the appropriate permissions, wished us well, and closed the
connection.

Enid saw a free meal. Kallhander saw good reason
to tag along.

“Why?” I said. “I thought you said your sidekick
was with Angharad already.” I gestured out the window in our room. “It’s not
like they need backup, is it?”

“It would be for both of your sakes as much as
hers.” Kallhander nodded in Enid’s direction as well. He hadn’t seemed
particularly surprised when he’d entered and seen her with one ankle up around
her ear, but I’d already figured he wasn’t the type to stare at much of
anything.

I shook my head. “You still think there’s someone
walking around out there, carrying a neuroflech with my name on it?
Our
names?”

“I’m continuing to assume there’s still some level
of threat. Besides, from everything I’ve seen, your skills are going to
continue to be of value.”

Enid grunted and rested her leg flat on the floor.
“You don’t think the two of us can handle trouble?”

Oh cosm, not this again, I thought. Out loud: “You
mean, ‘You don’t think
I
can handle trouble?’ Right?”

I suspect I found the whole thing funnier than she
did; she threw at my head a pillow that had fallen on the floor next to her. Either
her throwing arm was getting faster, or my block was slower. Kallhander’s smile
was suddenly broader than I remembered it ever being.

“Okay. Three for the price of one,” I said,
shaking my head at both of them. “The last time I had this many people fighting
over me, there was at least money involved.”

“Mr. Sim, if you want fair and direct compensation
for your work, that can be arranged—”

“I know, I know. But frankly, I’d rather have the
stuff you promised me.
That
has no pricetag. I’d just rather have it
sooner than later.”

“Tomorrow evening at the latest.”

“Can I get that in writing?”

Kallhander smiled. A timer with his name on it,
counting down to the next night local time, started somewhere in my CL
interface.

“Showoff,” I said.

Enid stood and made popping sounds with parts of her
body I wasn’t sure were supposed to bend. “And now you’ve testified to that,”
she groaned as she relaxed, “in front of a
witness
.”

I had been to Achitraka House
exactly
once in my life before, and then it had been on business. Biann and I—she was
then five months pregnant with Yezmé—had been on Kathayagara for the launch of
the second iteration of the Corona-class ships. We made promises to stop at
Achitraka House for a souvenir run, but between schmoozing at the reception
after the launch show and dining with investors, we never made it. It was no
pilgrimage, and we knew it, but we both regretted not making the trip. By the
time I had all the opportunity in the world to make that trip, I no longer
wanted to.

But here I was, standing in front of the
full-length mirror in my hotel room, adjusting my newly-extruded tie and vest,
switching the patterns and textures on the rest of my clothes. I wanted to look
dignified, but not somber, and I wasn’t finding the right look. It took me six
straight tries before it all came together: black, but with a slight
midnight-blue thread pattern that only stood out in the right light. A sharp
one-eighty from the linen look I normally used, with a dark hat to match.

It wasn’t until I was satisfied and restored the
mirror to its original state (it normally played a deck of anonymous
landscapes) that I wondered why I’d burned a good fifteen minutes on all that
preening. Who exactly are you trying to impress? I asked myself. It’s not as if
Angharad cares about looks; no one who spends ninety-eight percent of their
time in a dark robe and wimple is likely to dock you points for not being
dolled up. And yet at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to stand in front
of her without knowing I’d spent at least a little time on my looks—yes, even
if she
had
spent the better part of a day cooped up with me inside the
Vajra,
with all three of us looking like cat-draggings.

Minutes later, in the little hallway at the suite’s
front door, Enid finally joined us. I was about to give her a what-kept-you
speech when I saw why. She’d extruded a powder-blue divided skirt that
glittered and clung against her ankles when the wind hit her crosswise. From
the back of her dress there now sprouted a twin-tailed raiment of the same
color and half-translucency. Like a flowerbox that had blossomed overnight, I
thought. And she’d touched up her face a bit—a little red eye shadow, a little
lip gloss (all protomic Type D, of course). I’d come to associate the leotard
she’d worn ever since I met her with her standard look, but now I realized it
was only one possible look for her among many—and far from the most interesting.

“It’s not like you didn’t catch anyone’s eyes
before,” I said, “but now you’re working overtime to get looked at.”

“Thank you,” she smiled. “Any excuse to get
dressed up is a good one, right?”

“As long as it’s not a funeral,” I said. Or worse
yet, I thought, a Highend backup-resurrection party, where the
recently-restored dead have the effrontery to come back and annoy you some
more.

Kallhander, being Kallhander, looked exactly the
same: all black save for the red chevron on his cuff. I wondered idly if it was
against some rule for him to wear anything that didn’t make him look like a
manual traffic control signal.

It was just about noon local time when we stepped
out of the hotel lobby and slid ourselves into the backseat of a cab. The more
you traveled, the more you got used to the “daytime drift” that happened
between planets: a thirty-hour day here, a twenty-one hour day there. Kathayagara’s
day was only incrementally longer than a standard solar day, so it was well
within what any of us could handle.

From far away, Achitraka House always looks
strangely innocent and wistful—the gold of its spires, the green tint of the
panes of glass (and the darker green of the metal chasing holding it all
together). Then you get closer, and the picture-book castle turns into a
menacing basilica, the spires becoming teeth in the wide-open jaws of a
monster. In pictures, even in CL feeds, the House doesn’t have that ominous
quality to it; it doesn’t feel like a wall about to fall over on you.

Part of it is the sheer distances involved. There’s
no ground traffic allowed anywhere within the perimeter, an area about a good
kilometer or so out from the walls of the building itself. Our cab dropped us
at the gate—another open mouth made of panels of gold-chased green—and after
submitting our invitation we walked the thousand-plus steps along the path to
the actual entrance. Surprisingly crowded, too: tourists galore (who had bought
an hour pass or a day pass at the door); lantern-toting pilgrims in twos and
threes; the odd IPS officer in a variant of the same black bodysuit as
Kallhander’s, complete with red-chevron arm decorations.