Flight of the Vajra (27 page)

He was a weedy-looking bird of a man—broad
shoulders, but with a collarbone that stuck out like a piece of mismounted
woodwork trim and a waist so narrow it probably only had room for a single loop
of intestine. I could tell all this because his shirt was unbuttoned all the
way down the front, except for the chain across his throat that was actually
for his cape. He never seemed to stand up completely straight; he was always
bending forward at you (or away from you) from the waist. I could tell this
because in the time I was looking at him I watched him cant forward, then all
the way back, then all the way forward
again
like his torso and upper
body were all mounted on one big hinge. He was doing all this bending hither
and thither because he was holding up a stack of papers in front of him, like
he was comparing and re-comparing what he was seeing to what was on the page.

I know who this is, I thought. I was just hesitant
to believe it.

I took several leisurely steps to circle around
behind him and see what had his attention. The topmost page on the stack had a
simple line drawing that seemed like it was supposed to correspond with his
view of the sidewalk / corridor at the spot where he was standing: the door to
the club on his right, the drink kiosk further back, the view of the city to
the left . . . But something else about the whole image had his
attention—he kept flipping the drawing over vertically, holding it up apart
from the rest of the stack, flipping it back. Not like it was going to change
spontaneously; it wasn’t
that
kind of paper. That only made his act all
the more interesting.

He turned to face me, still holding up the flipped
picture; when removed from the stack the lines showed through on the other
side. “You see that?” he said. “You
see
that?”

“I see
something
,” I said. “What’s the
‘that’ I’m supposed to see?”

“It’s the same image! This way . . . and
this way—” He flipped the picture once more. “—it’s the same image. All the
lines—exactly the same, whether viewed from the front or the back. It’s
perfectly symmetrical along the
x
axis. Not one of the other pictures in
the stack was like that!”

“Well, except for the city.” I pointed at the
expanse of white on the left side of the drawing where the nighttime view of
the city ought to have been. “Definitely not
x-
symmetrical.”

“But it isn’t on the page, so it doesn’t count.”

“Point.”

“After all, I specifically asked that only the
most relevant details be included on the page. It didn’t have to be
forensically precise, just . . . navigationally so.” He whipped the
bottom-most picture back to the top—it was, I guessed, a view of the street
several blocks away, from the vantage point of someone standing and looking
down the avenue in the general direction of our building. Drawn on the image
was an arrow, with bolder lines than everything else in the picture, that
terminated at a doubly-thick
X
in the distance. “See, when I had the
directions prepared to this place, I decided to use a first-person mapping
method. Start with a view from somewhere, show you where you needed to go, then
pick up from there in the next picture, and so on. All subjective views, of
course.” He flipped to the next picture, which was another point-of-view image
from where the
X
was in the previous image. That much closer to the
target, and with another arrow showing you where to go. “I had a conventional
overhead map which I’d drawn myself, but I was looking at it and I said to myself,
‘Self, this isn’t what a person
sees
when they walk this route. Let’s
make a map that shows
that
instead.’ So I had some images collected from
the public visual feeds, and prepared this first-person walking map from those,
drawing each step as if I were walking it. Re-experiencing it. But this last
little wrinkle—I didn’t even realize it at the time. Only now . . . ”
He brought the last map to the top but mistakenly let the rest of the pages
slip out from between his thumb and forefinger, and the whole pile spilled
across his feet. I knelt down and helped him sweep everything back together.

“Seems like a lot of work for a map,” I said,
anticipating a backlash.

He straightened right up like I’d waved ammonia under
his nose. “Whenever I go somewhere new, I want to go somewhere
new
. In
every aspect. The destination, the journey, the cartography, the
methodology—there’s always a new way to do everything.” He gave me a little bow
(from that skinny joint of a waist, where else?) as I gave him back the
remaining pages.

Up close I could tell he was a Highender. The
face, the skin on the chest, the hair—it all had that too-perfect, never-aging
look to it. Ten to one most of it, if not the whole surface, was a protomic
graft. I doubted he would be able to get away with having an entire protomic
carcass, since those things were banned in so many places someone like that
wouldn’t have been able to leave his own living room. He had the kind of boyish
good looks women (and men) called “cute”, right down to the perpetually-tousled
haircut—but more than that there was an air about him, always bubbling away, of
having just gotten away with something. He most likely had.

“Let me guess,” he went on. “It all sounds too
much like
work
?”

“I think
she
would say something like—” I
nodded over at Ioné, who had chosen to hang back and simply watch the whole
thing. “—‘inefficient’. But I’m not her, so I’ll just say . . . ‘attention-getting’.”
It was the truth: in my eyes this guy wanted to hijack your attention any way
he could, and cosm take whatever else happened after that.

“
 
‘Attention-getting.’
Hm—all right, it’s a fair cop.” He worked his mouth around up one side of his
face and then the other. “And what’s wrong with garnering attention?”

“Nothing by itself! But you’ve gotta
go
somewhere with it once you have it.”

“Oh, I do, I do! Believe me, I do. Most of the
time, that is. Just not here and now. Think of this as my ‘attention-getting
down-time exercise’. If in the end the only attention I’ve snared is my own,
it’ll still be worth it.”

His CL was off, so he wasn’t actively broadcasting
an ident flag or anything. I could have polled him for it, but chatting with
him was more fun.

“So you, uh . . . ” I rocked on my heels
a little. “You get people’s attention for a living?”

His mouth opened and he pointed a finger at me for
a long moment while his words assembled themselves. “You know . . . that
is the
single best
description I have
ever
heard for what I do. I
get people’s attention for a living. Yes! And then I turn it right back around
and point that attention at other things. But I won’t lie; I think I’m well
worth the attention. At least at first!” He sidled in a bit. “You
. . . don’t actually know who I am, do you?”

“I’ve been out of circulation for a while. Haven’t
been following much news. That and I’m Old Way, mostly, so it’s not like I can
tell by just looking.” Hey, I told myself, it’s not like the majority of that was
lies.

“Oh, good! Because, really, it’s not all that
important that you know. In fact, if you know, that might have made it that
much harder for you to see what I was doing with clear eyes. That’s just my opinion,
but it’s drawn from what I’ve seen over all this time. People see someone sporting
a name, and then the name obscures everything else about them. They proceed
backwards
from
the name, instead of
to
it from everything else.
And while labeling—pattern-matching—
is
a survival trait, it’s actually
counter-survival when relied on in favor of . . . ” He stretched his
arms out at his sides and lifted his chin. “ . . . clearing the
senses . . . and letting them take precedence over cerebrality.”

“Couldn’t agree more.” The best way to handle
someone who loves to hear the sound of his own voice, I thought, is to just let
him stuff his own ears with it.

He relaxed his arms and chin. “So! We’ve
established my life’s role. What’s your line of work, then? Assuming you have one,
that is. Let’s say ‘vocation’, or ‘calling’ instead. —Wait, I have it: What do
you like to do, when you, uh, ‘do doing’?”

Good question. For someone like this, my stock
line—
I’m retired
—wasn’t going to cut it.
I’m a tourist
wouldn’t
work either. I needed to meet this guy on his own level.

“I’m a diplomatic adjunct,” I said, “for Her Grace
the Kathaya. Matter of fact, I just started this job yesterday. So go easy on
me.” Protocol would scarcely matter on someone this breezy, I thought.

“Fascinating! Tell me, is she really as great a
sweetheart as they say she is? I hear stories, but of course you can only get
so close and hear so much . . . ”

“Oh, absolutely. She’s all that and a ton more.”

Part of me was thinking
you know, Henré, if she
finds out about this, she’ll wring your neck and drink whatever comes out.
The
rest of me didn’t flinch, because the whole thing had been her idea in the
first place, and she had to know I’d have to run with it in public as well.

“So what brought you all the way down here?
Normally I’d assume your business as an adjunct would keep you, you know
. . . ” He made a vague gesture “out there”, towards the golden
glitter of the palace (which was only visible from here as a vague glow between
buildings).

“An old friend.”

He made another vague gesture “in there”, at the
club. “
This
place? —Wait.
Nishi
?!”

“Busted.” I couldn’t stop grinning.

“Cosm a-
live
! Where do you know Nishi from?
I only met her a couple of years ago, but I know she goes way back with certain
others warm bodies.”

“I used to be a sponsor of hers, early in her
career. Then we had a kind of a . . . a falling-out, and I came to
try and patch things back up again. I, uh . . . I got my fingers
burned, so I’m waiting for her to cool off before I go back in there.” Speaking
of which, I thought, I’d better get back inside and find out what Enid was up
to.

“Sounds like what you need is a . . . a-ha-ha!
Oh, cosmos alive, this is ironic . . . a d—”

“—a
diplomat
.” I said the word right along
with him, and laughed along with him too, although my laugh was a good deal
more mordant. “Well, we can’t do everything ourselves.”

“Then I’ll pitch in however I can, to patch up
your mutual bygones-to-be! By the way, never did catch the name. My fault; I
never shut up long enough to hear it.”

“Sim. Henré Sim.”

He didn’t say
THE Henré Sim?
, or anything
equally bowled-over—but that was only because he was about to one-up me
forever.

“A pleasure, Mr. Sim.” He executed a princely bow.
“Cioran, at your service. And at everyone else’s, too.”

The larger the universe,
the harder it
is for anyone to get away with having only one name.

Angharad was one of the few. Cioran was another.

Even people who’ve never been on a single Highend
world or met a Highender in person—and it’s easier to spend your life without
doing either of those things than you might think—knows the “Cioran story”. He
was born (incepted, decanted, but by all accounts he’s fine with “born”) on Formynx,
a Highend world that’s long thought of itself as a model for what the Old Way
worlds could grow up into as soon as they gave up all that silly
self-martyrdom. Formynx decided the best way to embody their ideals was to make
their people broadly useful, and so about a third of Formynx’s populace ends up
going off-world to run things for other worlds. There are plenty of places
willing to pay for the privilege of, say, a chief of security who only needs
four hours of sleep in a week—and who doesn’t need a drug regimen to pull that
off. They exported engineers, social managers, chiefs of police, military men,
organizers and discipliners and overseers of every stripe and strain.

With Cioran, they got their first honest-to-cosm
punk
.

Most young Formynxi have any burgeoning antisocial
or iconoclastic behavior smothered or redirected pretty quickly. But the
planet’s moderators tolerate a bit more skylarking from the percentage of the
populace that are fast-tracked as “exports”. For one, they found that people
who engage in a
little
of that behavior actually wound up becoming that
much more thoroughly integrated into whatever target society they fulfilled
their employment contracts with. In short, they had a chance to get it out of
their system and move on.

The other reason was more practical: when you’re
not going to stay on-world past your twenty-second birthday (solar), why bother
punishing behavior that for the most part straightens itself out? That said,
the real troublemakers don’t get exported from Formynx with their citizenship
or their employment binder intact. They just get exported, period. If they
think they’re so smart, then they can fend for themselves just fine without
needing Formynx’s backing.

Cioran was skirting a DX (dishonorable export) by the
time he was fifteen solar. His antics all started off innocently enough. For a report
which was a third of his grade for the semester, he turned in a paper document
he’d written entirely in longhand; he’d paid a fellow student a hefty finder’s
fee to have the paper, ink and pen imported from offworld. His reason? “The
professor went on all the time about challenges and aspiration, so I decided to
challenge both of us at once. I challenged myself to produce that document by
hand, and I challenged him to read something handwritten. He likened it to
being asked to deliver an oral defense of a dissertation in iambic pentameter.”
The professor, not sharing his love of atavisms, declined to give him the
course credits.

They allowed Cioran to retake the class next
semester, but by then he’d already upped his game. He bribed his way around the
domestic censorship firewall, and got his hands on many of the works that Formynx
teachers either discussed in dismissive tones or not at all. (He didn’t have to
work all that hard to possess them: for the Formynxi the most effective form of
censorship was belittlement, not outright prohibition.) He ran after-hours
games of turn-river poker in his dormitory, and misled the floor supervisors by
supplying the in-room sensory surfaces with bogus data cobbled together from
nights when there was no game. He used the earnings from the game to buy
passage and lodging for Ludmilla “Ludi” Celandonya, a gender-mutable courtesan
from Nystengard with whom he spent five “incandescent” (his word) hours. “When
I told her how I’d scraped together the cash to buy her time,” Cioran recalled
in his “ongo-biography” (so named, he said, because it was always being added
to),
“s/he waived the fee. The story alone to her was priceless.”

Not long after that, Cioran drew his long-looming DX
and was given three days to leave Formynx for keeps. It wasn’t what he had done
that was by itself so irksome; it was the way he’d crowed in public about it
all, with much underscoring of what ineffectual dolts his masters had been when
faced with his chicanery. He was blacklisted from representing himself as a
Formynxi, lost all his academic credits (not that they were transferable
anyway), and—worst of all—had all his imported “pornography” (read: banned
reading matter) confiscated and destroyed. He’d planned to sell some of it to fellow
students to finance his travels, but now he turned to an even more radical
plan: selling himself. On a whim, he called Ludi and asked, was there any room
for a fine, strapping young addition to their roster of talent? . . .
And maybe it would help that Formynxi were gender-mutable (although like many
Highend, Cioran male-identified by default for the sake of Old Way “backwards
compatibility”)?

For roughly a solar year Cioran enjoyed his new
friend’s hospitality. Many patrons of Ludi’s boudoir were thrilled to savor
Cioran’s company—not merely for his body, but because he was an enthusiastic
proponent of most every art form and mode of personal expression that had
become an indulgence or an antiquity. He hand-wrote love letters on demand for
patrons—many of them for Ludi, who papered over the dome-shaped ceiling of an
entire bedroom with them. He staged routines for guests that ranged from simple
on-the-spot conjurer’s tricks all the way into immersive performance art (as
when he would arrive late to a gala dinner in the guise of being Ludi’s loud-mouthed,
good-for-nothing sister) and at Ludi’s behest dealt with those who had
overstayed their welcome by pranking them (such as hacking into their luggage
and slipping in “souvenirs” that manifestly weren’t theirs). A terraforming
magnate paid Ludi lavishly to be seen with her for a gala reception on one arm and
Cioran on the other, his first in-public female manifestation. After that, he
and Ludi spent no small amount of time jabbing gleefully at each other as to
who was the more ogled.

One of the gifts said magnate lavished on Cioran
wound up consuming almost all his free time from then on: a polylute, a control
device designed to turn any available protomic surface into a sounding board.
The stock polylute only worked with surfaces explicitly keyed to work with it,
but one readily-available hack later Cioran could walk into a room and make
everything from the furniture to the walls both sing out his song and project
visuals to go with it. Such ambush concerts typically didn’t last more than a
minute or two at a time before someone pulled the plug, but once you had
someone’s attention it was remarkable how much you could wring from it before
they threw you out by your ear.

Wanderlust dragged Cioran out of Ludi’s arms (not
without plenty of tears on both their sides, though, and many sobbed promises
to return). He’d been sworn not to release CL recordings of his experiences
behind her closed doors—but nothing said he couldn’t
write
about any of
it, and soon he joined the ranks of the few still appealing to the Old Way
worlds via their flair with the written word. The fact a live-action CL version
of the same story was commissioned almost immediately (and did far better
business) didn’t change his mind about his affinity for artistic archaisms.
“The Old Way,” he proclaimed, “got one thing right: you can sometimes do more
with one word than you can with a thousand CLs. Too bad about everything
else
they preached, though. Never have so many people felt so good about making
their own lives into such pains in the ass.”

And so he wandered—or, as he put it,
peripatized.
His “ambush concerts” expanded from five-minute spur-of-the-moment seizings of
the attention span into full-blown, lavishly-funded and -attended events. No
concert would take place without at least one new song added to the playlist of
perennial favorites: “Phoenix Out” one year, “Youtopia” the next, then “Sorceries”,
“Equinoxygen”, “Chronillogical”, “Fourtold”, “Unlost”, and on and on.

But mostly, he got into trouble—the kind of
trouble some people wouldn’t mind being embroiled in. He got into trouble, got
out of it, got back into it, and documented it all for readers, watchers,
listeners and CLers alike. When he ran up an all-but-unpayable tab at Casino
Nexhep’s seven-and-sterling tables, he paid for it by offering Nexhep’s
daughter a “solo concert”. (“The bed in her room would have been a better
lay—in fact, it
was
,” he wrote.) When someone, possibly the lady
herself, released what was alleged to be a bootleg CL dump of the whole
“performance”, Cioran not only denounced it as being a fraud but not remotely
raunchy enough . . . and produced
his own
professed fakery,
complete with his own running commentary about his partner’s ineptitude, that
set new high-water marks for first- and third-person filth. Said partner didn’t
share his flippancy and sued him for defamation of character and invasion of
privacy, sparking speculation it wasn’t
that
much of a fake. His offer
to settle via staging
another
“show” and forwarding her the proceeds went
unanswered; they settled privately.

He invited himself to parties that hadn’t even
been thrown yet, offended everyone who had made a career out of not taking a
joke (about the only person he
hadn’t
lampooned one-on-one was the
Kathaya), and accrued enough of an ambient reputation that he had allegedly
gone a decade and change without having to pay out of his own pocket for a
single meal, hotel room, or mode of transport.

By the time I’d started on my own self-appointed
mission, he was filing a weekly column with
The Oberona
(entitled “As I
Like It”), curating a remotely-updated gallery installation of his CL still-impressions
wherever there was a network link, and having at least one of his ambush
concerts every ten to twenty solar days. Given that Formynxi tended to live
into the century-and-a-half range, and he was barely forty, he was bound to be
pissing off all the right folks for a good long time to come.

Once upon a time, I used to joke: “I want to be just
like him when I grow down.” It took me a while to realize a case of perpetually
arrested development probably didn’t make for the best object of envy.

But if I was jealous
of his compulsive
freedom, I didn’t show it just then—not while returning Cioran’s goofy bow (no
way I could bend myself in half like that without rupturing something) or
tipping my hat at him. The way he eyed my hat, he seemed to be coveting it.
Maybe not because the design itself was anything special—who coveted such a
thing in this day and age?—but because it was the hat on
my
head, and
someone like him always wanted what wasn’t his.

I couldn’t keep the smugness completely off my face
as I walked back into Nishi’s, only a couple of steps behind Cioran. Ioné was a
step or two behind me as well, and had offered no comment about the entire
exchange that had taken place—not out loud, not even by CL. I continued to
assume she was preoccupied with telling Kallhander about everything.

Any thoughts about whatever sideband discussion
they were having were thrown clean out of my head when we re-entered. The
rowdiness had been silenced; the rips in the ceiling and the rattiness of the
tables had all undone themselves. A lone trumpet and piano played longingly off
each other as Enid, having reconstituted her performance tights, bent herself
over backwards in the middle of the roped ring. She’d detached the trailing
raiment she’d been wearing and was now using it as a stick ribbon, dragging the
cloth slowly across her thighs as she bent and unbent her knees. I don’t think
any of the thirty-odd people in there were breathing—definitely not Nishi and
her surrounding cronies, who were perched on the bar like they were ready to
jump from it and land in the ring themselves.

Cioran started to sneak over to them, then wised
up and just parked himself in a chair for the rest of the performance. The last
thing one good performer was going to do was interrupt someone else’s work. I
couldn’t see Cioran’s face from where I stood, so I ducked down and inched
around to one side. Just as I thought: all the silliness and flamboyance had
vanished and was replaced with rapt attention and focus. Seemed about right, I
thought: scratch the silly ones and you always find something serious
underneath, somewhere.

I let my attention go back to and stay with Enid.
She bent herself this way and raised herself that way, turned and half-fell,
caught herself and rose again. Some painful longing seemed to be taking hold of
her, digging deep into her face and lengthening its lines. Something is coming
through
her, I thought; something that won’t come through any other way except through
such effort on her part that it clearly costs her something. But then I looked
again, and saw that she was smiling—that the pain I’d seen a moment ago was the
performance itself, and that it had fooled even me.
So what else is she
capable of doing?
I thought, and I was still lingering on that when the
music finally petered out and she rested on her knees with her arms spread
wide.

The room shook with applause. Cioran vaulted over
the ropes, struck a pose, and took one end of her ribbon in his fingers.

“May I have this next dance?” he said.

Enid faced him and stood up, and it was only after
she’d risen all the way to her feet did it register with her who this was
standing in front of her. You could see it: there was a second where all the
cheer and gratitude slid right off her face to reveal the gaping stupefaction
underneath. Yes, Enid, I wanted to say out loud, that’s
the
Cioran. Even
if his CL ident isn’t broadcasting, there’s no mistaking him. (Small wonder he
doesn’t turn it on: if he did, he’d be mobbed every time he opened a window to
get some sun.)