Flight of the Vajra (22 page)

Flanking the path were raked sands, decorated with
free-standing plasma-light forms, the kind you saw in most Old Way congregation’s
spaces . . . and at one point, a giant Cycle lantern. I stared at it,
so much so I almost blundered into someone else kneeling at the pathside. Once,
I thought, things like this had only existed in all the individual shrines and
cloisters of the Old Way—like the one a short walk from my own house. Out in
front of that building had been a lantern, a more durable version of the balsa-wood
ones we’d cobbled together for the Cycle, maybe half a meter high. It usually wasn’t
lit, but it was positioned in such a way that at the right time of day, on
certain days, you could stand at the bottom of the hill that held the shrine
and see the sun setting it alight for a few minutes. A proud and brave little
thing. And now here in the garden to my left was a lantern four or five times
the size of that one. It didn’t look proud or brave; it just looked
big
.

When was the last time the Achitraka had really
done
anything on its own? I wondered. The symbol of the lantern hadn’t even been
invented by anyone
in
the Achitraka; it was the creation of a mendicant
Wayfarer, Subaram Jianshah. The Achitraka only picked up on it and made it a
centerpiece of the Cycle prayers after he’d been dead for years. Small wonder
Enid’s passing comment “I bet
that
one’s not made of paper and sticks”
didn’t so much as make me turn my head, let alone put a smile on my face.

“Hey,” she said to me more directly. She stepped
into my line of sight and walked backwards facing me. “What is it? You look
like someone spat in your drink.”

“Yeah, the guy who built that eyesore.” I pointed
at the lantern. “Nice way to ruin a perfectly beautiful sand garden.”

“It’s not
that
bad.”

“I should be carrying one of those in my hand, not
decorating my lawn with it. Anyway.” I gestured ahead of us, where Kallhander
was leading the way by a few steps. If he had heard anything, he showed no sign
of it. He was too busy presenting himself to the guards on duty, listing
himself in our company. I remembered how I’d told Enid
It’s me, not me plus
one
for Angharad’s original invite, and now Kallhander had gone and
attached himself to our party as well. Then again, he had both privilege and an
excuse: we’d learned right after coming out of the cab that Ioné was already on
her way over with Angharad in tow.

One quick search-and-scan later, the guards—not
IPS this time, but honor guard reminiscent of Mimu and Wani—walked us in.

Achitraka House on the inside is as unlike your
local Old Way shrine as that giant lantern on the lawn was like the one you
piece together on your own. It’s all great sweeping curves that give way to
airy inner spaces, like being in the middle of a whole slew of ship’s sails—nothing
like the spare but somehow also homey air you sense in your neighborhood
congregation. There, you feel like you’re in a place where you can sit
knee-to-knee with your fellow Wayfarers. In here, it felt like I was being
taken on a guided tour of the fossilized, translucified remains of some whale’s
digestive tract. They’d flooded the space with light channeled from the outside
and pumped out from protomic strip fixtures and glow-canvases, but I was too
much of an engineer and a designer, both, to know how downright threatening it
would all look once the sun went down and you turned the lights out.

Enid, like me, had her eyes wide at everything,
but I suspect she was being far more of a conventional tourist than I was. It
is, after all, her first time here, I told myself; I shouldn’t work overtime to
ruin it for her.

We paused on the second-floor landing of the
stairwell we were ascending and looked out into the building’s stomach: the
first floor was nothing more than a ring around an atrium-like space that went
down for what seemed like half a kilometer. The ceiling above was at least as
high.

“If there was any way I could hang from those
rafters,” she said, pointing up and up, “and do a trapeze act . . . ”

“Give the girl a temple and all she sees is a
stage.” I followed her gaze, pictured myself the scene she was describing. Enid,
a dot on the end of an undulating string, mocking gravity . . . “But
oh man, what a stage.”

“You just break us in through the ceiling,” she
said. “I can put the show on all by myself.”

Kallhander cleared his throat. The guards flanking
us had paused dutifully as we’d gawked, but I suspected Kallhander was worried
they didn’t have even his soupçon of a sense of humor.

The room they led us into felt like it was made of
the first straight lines I’d seen on the entire grounds, barring the path we’d
walked to the front door. If anything it was reminiscent of the Public Pavilion
room back on Cytheria: mats on the floor, cushions to sit on, a raised platform
at the far end of the room (also cushioned) looking out over what seemed like
the glittering whole of Kathayagara City. We were only a couple of stories up
in the building proper, but the building
itself
was on an artificial
island whose bottom started where the tops of many other buildings left off.

There was absolutely nothing to do but wait. Our
CLs were inert; their external connections had dropped the minute we’d set foot
in Achitraka House. Only Kallhander’s CL still worked—one of the perks of being
IPS, I guessed—but I wasn’t about to bother asking if I could leech from him. I
had more than enough to fill my senses by looking out the window, at both the
city and the ocean beyond. Enid and Kallhander sat, and the silence was quickly
broken by Enid’s voice:

“This place shouldn’t feel this creepy, somehow.”

So maybe she had felt a little of what I was
feeling, out on the front garden path. I didn’t prod her further, just took
quiet note of it and went off on a different tangent:

“There’s always something about personal presence
that you never get any other way. I didn’t know I was going to get this view,
for instance. Well, I could have taken a virtour and seen a version of it, but
not . . .
this
itself.” That was one thing the Old Way had
always been right about: somewhere under all the simulacra we could make of
life, there was always going to be a Real Thing somewhere—and we’d crave it
even if we didn’t know about it.

“It was the same with my schooling,” Kallhander
added. “You began with independent study, and one of the rewards of proving
your top-one-percenter status in class was individual tutoring by the
professors. I scoffed at the idea that being in the same room as the man somehow
mattered. That’s how I felt at first, anyway.”

“What changed your mind?” Enid said.

“Being in the same room with the man.” That made
us both laugh, probably to his dismay; he went on. “The vast majority of my
original education was not in that vein. At first I resisted this new method,
but by halfway through the first semester I was caught up in proving to him that
I
could
win by his rules. I
would
sit in that lecture hall and at
the end of it present him with a dissertation that I was proud to defend.”

“Did you?” Enid said.

“Oh yes. And after I graduated, I said to him, ‘You’re
the most impossible man I’ve ever admired.’ He liked that quite a lot.”

Enid laughed and stretched her legs out in front
of her.

“I wasn’t used to that at all,” he added.

“Used to what?” Enid said.

“Admiring someone.”

“What’s wrong with admiring someone?” I stepped
away from the window and hunkered down next to Enid. “You make it sound like a
personal failing.”

“He was one of the very few people I’d met who I’d
started by either not knowing at all, or disliking a great deal, and ended with
feeling was worth the admiration. —Apart from you as well.”

I guess that’s why I’m getting all these details
and no one else would, I thought. And I’m not sure that’s wise.

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Enid said. “There
aren’t a whole lot of people out there worth admiring. The longer you admire
anyone, the bigger the chance they just let you down anyway. And I’m not going
to live like that if I can help it.”

“Hey. There
is
a difference between
admiration and blind faith, you know.” I gestured around. “I do admire our
host, even if we’ve ended up on opposite shores of the river, as it were. And
from everything I’ve gathered, she’s all right with that.”

“I just want something—” She looked at a spot on
the floor near my shoe. “—something that isn’t going to make me feel like I’m
bound
up
with others. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve always felt like I was walking
in other people’s footsteps, climbing on their shoulders. Always wondering,
when do I get to a place that’s nothing but
me
?” Her gaze rose and met
mine. “Why do you think I fought so hard to come along with you? You’ve got
more than a little of that going on. I wanted to learn from you how to, you
know, free myself like that.”

I looked right back at her for seconds on end,
letting her see the way my face was sagging at the corners.

“Even if that kind of freedom isn’t what you think
it is?” I finally said.

She didn’t have an answer, so I decided to confuse
her a little further: “On the one hand, you’re saying, ‘I want to be free.’ On
the other hand, you’re attaching yourself to me as a way to do that. You don’t
see that as a contradiction?”

“Well, I didn’t figure it would all happen in one
step or anything. Besides—it’s not like I’m all that bad a houseguest, right?
Ship-guest, whatever.”

Damn her for putting a smile back on my face so
quickly. “As far as traveling together,” I said, “getting your mission
accomplished—you know now I’m good for that part, provided we don’t get knocked
off course.” There, I’d come out and said it. “You can understand I had my
reasons for saying no, right?”

“I can now.”

“But as far as what you want to learn
. . . I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for. At
least not in the form you’re looking for it.” I wasn’t about to go into how I’d
been there—not in front of Kallhander, anyway—but at some point, I told myself,
she’s going to need to hear that story. The uncensored version.

Enid raised her chin. “How about I try looking for
it first, and
then
you can say ‘I told you so’?”

“Deal.”

We clapped each other’s shoulders. Kallhander’s
hands moved, then came back to rest in his lap. I wondered if he’d been
suppressing the urge to applaud.

“Just one thing, okay?” I told her. “Whatever you
do, don’t look at me and convince yourself you see something that isn’t there.”

“Like what?” Her smile lost a little of its
breadth.

“All you’re going to get is what you see, nothing
more than that.”

“But it
is
enough.”

That last wasn’t spoken by her—it had come from just
beyond the door, which had just opened.

The Sixteenth Kathaya looked no different from
when we had parted at the dock—a little puffy around the eyes, but that was
about it. Ioné, who followed her inside from exactly one meter behind (it was
hard to imagine her not calibrating each step as she took it), still looked
like she’d been freshly cast from whatever die had produced her.

Angharad pressed her hands together in front of
me, bowing her head, and once again I felt foolish for not saluting her first.
Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to feel so comfortable around her,
even if some retrograde part of me still flinched at the idea.

“I am sorry to have kept all of you waiting,”
Angharad said, “but there was an interruption on the way over here. One of my
colleagues is expecting children. You both met him briefly—Prelate Jainio?”

That explained what I took to be his case of
nerves, I thought. “Congratulations to him.”

“His wife entered labor this morning; I spoke with
him briefly as he passed through on his way back home. In cases like this,
where a child is born to a member of the Achitraka, it is customary that I am
the godmother.”

“So that’s happened before?” Enid said. She’d
already risen from her cushion, and damn my eyes if she hadn’t given Angharad a
bow on standing up earlier. Well, a
little
bow.

Angharad grinned; it was the most playful look I’d
seen her give yet. “This is the sixth time now. Four boys and two girls. I
understand a seventh and possibly an eighth is on the way, as well. Now
. . . ” She turned to Kallhander and Ioné. “ . . . would
you do us the favor of—”

“We understand completely. We’ll be waiting, as
there’s still business to conduct with Mr. Sim afterwards.” Ioné spoke for both
of them.

Kallhander gave Angharad the bow I didn’t think he’d
bother with, and he and his cohort stepped outside. I could have sworn he
looked like he envied us right as the door shut. I have to stop kidding myself
like that, I thought.

They brought in low tables
bearing
large covered bowls, and when we knelt on the cushions in front of them I
briefly felt more like a supplicant than a guest. I couldn’t help noticing the
meal was entirely meatless: rice, bean curd, deep-fried and pickled vegetables,
mushroom slices, a necklace of green onion garnish along the sides. Then I
realized it was
they
who were probably playing it safe: when asked about
the meal I’d said anything they served was fine with us (why be picky with
hosts like this?), and so they were only being obliging. No matter: it was piquant
stuff, and whole minutes went by with all of us—Angharad included—eating in
sunny silence. Enid ran her dipper around the edges of her bowl with gusto; I
imagined her licking the bowl clean if Angharad hadn’t been there.

“I imagine you find all this somewhat surprising
and secretive,” the Kathaya said after we had all made most of our way through
our meals. “I am not normally in the habit of being so insular.”