Flight of the Vajra (26 page)

In the split second I teetered over the hole, I
felt two thin little arms encircle me from behind and grant me far more balance
and support than I would ever have credited them for. Enid might have looked
like a twig, but she was a twig wrapped in some good muscle, and I was pretty
sure in that moment she wasn’t getting any assistance from her clothes.

The party had been in swing for some time now.
Every table was full; people lined up against the walls and crowded in close at
the foot of the ring (house rule: if you’re up there, sit on the floor) to get
a view of the two sound-poetry sluggers who were spewing phonemes at both each
other and the crowd. Half the tables looked like they’d been used for target
practice by riot police; the other half looked like they’d been used to sled
down a snowless mountainside. Bits of the ceiling dangled down like the hull of
a half-peeled orange. With each spat-out syllable came that much more damage.

And in the back, sitting on top of what was left
of the bar with one leg crossed over the other, was Nishi herself, bellowing
back at the two on stage with her hands cupped around her mouth. She had the
same clay-red hair, the same stringy toughness that I’d experimentally sparred
with one day and which she’d used to knock the stuffing out of and back
into
me.

Nishi turned her head towards the opening door, took
one look at me, then pushed herself off the bar and stalked into the back. I
felt my stomach knot itself into a Klein bottle. She might end up trying to
knock the stuffing out of me this time, too, I thought, and not bother to put
it back in.

“Nishi,” I called out, but the din in the place
stopped anything that came out of my mouth from traveling more than a few centimeters.
I was about to toggle my CL back on and holler for her that way, but I decided
that might well have just made things worse.

I leaned back over to Enid. “I’ll be a moment,” I
said into her ear, and double-timed it to the other side of the main room. From
behind me the poetry duel continued: “On O’Brien, may Carpathia have its bead,
/ irretrievable, augustan / see Lethe and occupy some assignation / its
alphabet in prostitution / in molt, in upstand . . . ”

The kitchen door was open, and through it I saw Nishi
still hurrying away from me. I ducked inside just before the door shut, hoping
I wasn’t going to trigger some kind of biometric alarm and get bounced to the
floor.

Nishi evidently sensed me entering and so turned
to face me, half-hiding behind one of the work tables. The kitchen was a
well-scrubbed, Old Way-style manual-preparation outfit; I had to shove my hands
into my pockets to stifle the temptation to run my hands across all that marble
and wood and brushed stainless.

I decided to start with my forehead to the rug and
work my way up from there. “Is it still war?” I said.

“There was never a ‘war’, Henré.” Nishi came that
much closer, but only so she could fold her arms at me and make it look like
she was on the verge of cold-cocking me one. “Just you running out on
everything I ever thought you believed in. You were trying to take
responsibility
for something once upon a time. That was the Henré I knew. And then that Henré
turned into this—I don’t know what—”

“Coward?” I suggested. “Sellout?” Go on, I
thought, rip the scab all the way off.

“Yes. Coward, sellout; I’ve got a hundred more
words like that and then some. All because you had some money dangled in your
face.”

“That and a lawsuit, remember? And a lot of other—”

She knifed the air crosswise in front of her with
the flat of her hand. “You didn’t care about
any
of those things. You
would have been happy to never work as a designer again if you were able to
find out what had happened. You would have been happy to wreck your reputation,
if . . . Well, you sure got
one
of those wishes to come true,
didn’t you? —So. I hear about you showing up here and there, bumping around,
getting sloshed. Falling asleep on beaches, half-drowning, having the lifebuoys
bail you out. Real smooth stuff, Henré.”

She was half-right. Two years back I’d fallen
asleep on a beach and almost drowned—and, yes, the automated lifebuoys had
dragged me back to dry land and resuscitated me—but only because I’d been
waiting for what I thought was a possible lead, and I’d had a total of two
hours of sleep over the course of four days.

I need to go to the hard sell as fast as I can, I
thought. “Nishi, there’s new evidence what happened wasn’t an accident or a
mistake on my part.”

That part got through her armor. “What kind of
evidence?”

“Courtesy of IPS. They came to me, offered me
information for my help with a similar case. I’m neck-deep in it so I can’t
talk about it more than that. —
Look
.” I closed the rest of the distance
between us just as she was about to turn away. “I’m not saying you have to
treat me like royalty. I just want some way to show you that all the stuff I
believed in, I still believe in it. It’s just been a while before I could find
a way to demonstrate it properly.” None of this was coming out with a gram of
confidence; it was all fits and starts.

“You spend that settlement of yours yet? Why don’t
you send it back where it came from? That’d be a good way to ‘demonstrate’. It’s
not like you
need
that money, right? —How much was it, anyway? Seven
figures? Eight?”

“I’m not allowed to say. That was part of the
agreement.”

“The agreement where they don’t sue you? Since
when did Henré Sim ever back away from a little
rumble
?” She threw an
open-handed shove at my shoulder—not hard enough to knock me around, just
enough to hurt in ways that weren’t even physical. Yes, I wanted to shout at
her; yes, I was stupid and short-sighted and even greedy. Yes, you’re not
telling me anything I don’t already know. And yes, if this is the price I have
to pay to get you to listen to me again . . .

“Why did you do it, Henré?” Damn her if she didn’t
sound tender right then. “Why’d you fold? Why’d you let them pay you off and
send you packing?” She jabbed me again.

When all else fails, why not the truth?

“Because I thought they were right,” I said. I
reached out and cupped my hand around hers when it was still in mid-jab. “And
by the time I realized they weren’t right, everything had already burned to the
ground.”

I lowered my hand with hers still in it and let
her get a good look at my face. She drank in the sight for a few moments, then shrugged
me off and took a step back.

“You’re not going to get back the man you knew
once,” I went on. “He’s gone for keeps now. Thing is, if you’d known then he
was capable of something like that in the first place, would you have ever
wanted him to begin with? Well, he’s gone now, anyway; he’s been replaced by
someone who knows better.”

“You are the least convincing apologizer I have
ever heard.” She almost sounded amused. Progress.

“Come on. It’s got to be a better apology than the
time your ex-girlfriend showed up with the toy Afghan and the fire-flowers.
What was her name? Yulia?”

“Yular.” Half her mouth was smiling. More progress.

“Yular. There we go.”

“Henré.” The smile was now gone. “I’m not going to
slam any more doors in your face, but . . . right now, frankly, I’m
not about to revise my opinion of you five minutes after you walk in here. I’ve
got more than enough on my shoulders right now. I’m expecting some pretty important
company, and it’s someone who has a slightly better pedigree with me than you
do. Maybe after he’s out of here and I’m not doing eight things at once, I’ll
be able to—” She looked at me like I was a pet with no backup that was about to
be put to sleep. “—hear you out a little more seriously.”

“Who’s your guest?”

“Nobody you know. But if you ask me, I don’t think
he’d spit on your forehead if you had a fever."

Continuing to grovel at a former friend’s feet would
do nothing but get my chin dirty. I turned around and almost knocked the wind
out of myself on the corner of a carving station.

I didn’t even watch where I was going
during
most of my blind charge through the noise and clamor of the club. I just sort
of felt my way back through to the entrance and burst back out into the
street-corridor. Night was now almost completely blanketing everything, and
they’d switched on the lighting-deflection effect that allowed you to stand
right up against the glass and not let any of the illumination from the rest of
the corridor crowd out your view of the outside—and especially your view of the
sky above.

Right next door to the entrance was a drink kiosk.
The last thing I wanted to do was spend any of my money in Nishi’s place, so I
raised the back of my hand to the plate and charged a Speznagost Draft to one
of my extant accounts. The kiosk bitched about my money not being in a domestic
account and finally tried to assess me a transaction fee that was an order of
magnitude more than the beer itself. My upraised hand became a fist and I gave
the kiosk’s faceplate a futile little smite. I envied Enid and her pocket full
of cash, so useful in more instances than just when governments imploded on a
moment’s notice.

“Allow me.”

Ioné was standing to one side, her left hand out,
offering to pay. The fact she was preparing to pony up the money for my drink
was only slightly more astonishing than the fact she was there at all. I stood
back and let her pay.

“What brought you all the way out here?” I said. “Did
I leave my galoshes back at the hotel?”

“You and the girl both disappeared from the CL
grid at this point. I thought I’d look into it.”

“It’s nothing to worry about. The club has a no-CL
policy, that’s all.” I opened the Speznagost and waited for it to settle. “Enid’s
still in there—I think she’s watching the poetry match. Or suffering from it. I
just came back out from completely failing to win over an old friend with my
effusive charm.”

Speznagost tasted bitterer than I remembered. I
chalked that up to the moment and drank deeper.

“That must have been a very heated conversation,”
she said.

“Yeah. Cold burn, you could say. Arctically so.”

“All the same, she still consented to speak to
you.”

“Sure, for about two whole minutes.”

“That sounds as if it indicates some ambivalence
on her part.” She sounded way too cheerful and curious for this conversation,
but I forgave her tone out of gratitude for having someone to talk to about it.

“Ambivalence?” I said, “Ambivalence is not the
same thing as forgiveness in the making. Ambivalence means . . . the
door can swing back open all the way, or it can slam shut in my face. Besides,
as someone else once said, “
 
‘We
may be compelled to forgive our enemies, but nowhere are we commanded to
forgive our friends.’
 
”

“Having another party vouch for you might help.”

I was about to brush that off like so many crumbs
from the table when I realized what she was saying.

“Thanks,” I said, at about half my regular volume,
“but that’s just going to come off as ham-handed. That and if you look in her
dictionary you’ll see the acronym ‘IPS’ expands to something pretty filthy.”

“My pride is not
that
easily injured, Mr.
Sim.” Damned if she wasn’t actually laughing it off.

“Is that ‘I’ as in Ioné or ‘I’ as in Continuum?”

“It’s become customary for Continuum nodes to
refer to their own exclusive experience through the first person singular, with
plural for Continuum as a whole.”

“Either way, I wasn’t thinking it was your
pride
that’d be injured.” I sighed into my drink. “Look, I’ve made my case to her;
she’s just going to have to make up her own mind about the new me. Or decide
whether or not there
is
a ‘new me’. I don’t like it, but there it is.”

“I’m surprised at how sensitive you are to being
rejected this way.”

“Why? Is this going in your psych profile report?”

“It’s part of my duty to keep track of the
emotional health of all human assets during the course of any mission. A low
psychological health index correlates strongly with poor performance. The more
resilient you are emotionally—”

“—the more useful I am to you. Pretty obvious.” I
took another drink. “Well, don’t let me being grouchy about this put too much
of a black mark on my report card. I kind of figured I was facing a dead end
with her; I just wanted to—” What would be a good word here? “—
engrave
that into myself a little more deeply. All I ended up doing was giving myself a
little more false hope.” I faced her with one of my more fake smiles. “But that’s
what beer is for, isn’t it?”

She processed this for a moment—it seemed better
to imagine her
processing
something than
thinking
about it—then
said, “Keep us informed about how late you plan to stay out.”

Sure thing, Mom. “Right now, don’t ask me about
plans.”

“I only ask as a precaution, for the sake of
tomorrow’s scheduling. Kallhander and I are both short-sleepers, so it will be your
diurnal schedule that dictates our activities.”

“Short-sleepers? You, I figured as much, but what’s
his personal record? A week without a wink? Two weeks?”

“That would be for him to say.” Her smile made me
think she’d asked him before and been rebuffed.

I turned back to my beer and then realized we had
an eavesdropper.

It took another moment to realize this wasn’t, in
fact, an eavesdropper. Yes, he’d distinguished himself from the other
pedestrians strolling by Nishi’s place to pause in front of the door, but it
didn’t look like he was stalling there to catch wind of what we were saying. I
made a mental note to stop resisting CLed conversations if it meant using them
granted that much more security, given who I was working for now.