Flight of the Vajra (28 page)

“Absolutely,” she breathed out, and brought her
smile back bigger than ever. The laugh that went with it trembled a little, and
she looked sidelong at us (me?) as if to say
I’m in way over my head, aren’t
I?

I gave her a confident smile right back and a slow
nod. A little water in the knees and some butterflies in the stomach weren’t
going to throw her. Not the her that I’d seen, anyway.

Someone found another tune to play—a distant,
bouncy, sprightly thing with an airy voice acapella-ing along on top of it all.
Cioran took hold of one end of the ribbon, Enid the other, and the two wound
around and around each other like they were dressing a maypole in half-time.
Sometimes they wound themselves in the ribbon and drew that much closer to each
other; then they unwound and drifted apart.

The ribbon itself, too, began to participate in
new ways: it grew that much filmier and broader, until it had barely the
consistency of a soap bubble (and the same iridescence). Soon it was a veil
that they twined around their upper bodies—no, a winding-sheet, as it had also
become that much more opaque and strong. By the time the song’s final, piping
high notes petered out, the veil had split into many undulating ribbons and
slid from their shoulders onto the floor.

I wasn’t the first one on my feet clapping, but
only because I was too busy staring. It wasn’t that I’d never seen such a rite before;
you could see performances with the same protomic accoutrements on any number
of streetcorners, or dance halls like the one we’d glimpsed across the street
earlier. It was how a total stranger and another total stranger could step into
the same space, speak the same wordless language and become instant friends.
And no CL between them had been needed. All it took was the presence of the
other person, and a single move on each of their parts.

Nishi pushed off from the bar, rolled over the
ropes into the ring and gave both performers a shoulder-clap. She reserved the
hug-and-lift for Cioran himself, though, who looked just as pleased to see her.
Good, I thought; at least
someone
out of her past is making her happy
tonight.

“When are you
ever
gonna get rid of this
silly habit of yours of dropping in with barely any forewarning?” Nishi gave
Cioran a slap-and-shove that in her vocabulary of body language counted as a
playful nudge.

Cioran’s feigned gall was masterful. “What, at the
expense of my very carefully-cultivated personal style? I thought you knew me
better than that by now! —Oh, uh, this fellow here—he and I were conversing
outside . . . ”

He pointed at me as I stepped in closer. Nishi’s
joy drained away all over again.

“Cioran, I’m not talking to him,” she said.

“But why? He’s marvelous company, from what I’ve
seen.”

“If he’s that great company,
you
go hang
out with him.”

This battle’s not worth losing any more blood
over, I thought, and put my hands up. “I’ll go.”

Cioran grew flustered, which only hurt me all the
more. “No! No, Mr. Sim, don’t run off. In my experience there’s nothing that
can’t be patched up between people with a little talk and a judicious amount of
alcohol!”

I didn’t hear what Nishi said next to him, but I
wasn’t trying to, and so I turned back to Enid. Ioné had stepped out of a
corner and provided Enid with a damp towel to wipe off with, probably one
liberated from behind the bar. All the life and electricity that was in Enid’s eyes
lost some of its wattage when she saw me putting my back to Cioran with the
look I had on my face.

I shouldn’t ruin her fun, I thought.

“You wanna stick around and join the party?” I said
to Enid, and canted my head at the raucous wall of people forming in the far
corner. “You know how to get back to the hotel.”

“I received word from both Kallhander and our IPS
office before we entered the club,” Ioné said, in a more commanding tone than
she’d used to either of us before. “They are strongly against you—us—remaining out
of CL contact for any prolonged period of time. Especially for something not
entirely mission-critical.”

You people, I thought. Can’t turn down a single
chance to be party poopers, can you?

Enid looked back at where Cioran and most everyone
else in the rear of the club were now whooping it up. She looked like someone
had kicked her dog out of the car she had been riding in.

“Looks like we gotta go,” I said to her.

“I
know
.” She turned her face away. So much
for not ruining her fun.

It wasn’t the first time I had been in the middle
of something—an uneasy talk, a blunt-nosed confrontation, a moment when a
decision had stretched in front of me like a fissure opening in the ground—and
had been tempted to simply throw everything to the floor and walk out. I could,
I thought, leave this place, go downstairs, hail a cab and be at Angharad’s
doorstep in minutes. The hour wouldn’t matter; she’d receive me, she’d only be
too grateful to know that I was willing to pick her and say yes to her mission.
It was my own father who’d showed me one day, when I couldn’t have been more
than ten, how “grownups” sometimes do just such things, that “grownups” can be
every bit as angry and fickle as children, that “grownups” can get away with
doing all of those things if they make a strong enough case for their anger
with other grownups. He had invited a friend of his over for turn-river poker,
and caught the other man palming one of the chips. My father had snatched it
from him and flung at his head; he’d missed and instead the chip had smashed a piece
off the inside of one of the little porthole-sized stained-glass windows he’d
put into our house with his own hands. There had never been an apology or an
explanation, and the incident had settled down into the sediment of my life
that had later become bedrock. The windowpane remained chipped for the rest of
our lives.

It’s not like I can’t get away with it.

I told myself that all the way out the door and
through the corridor, with Enid stomping away in front of me and Ioné coolly
keeping her distance as she brought up the rear. Every additional step I took
in synchrony with them was another opportunity wasted to break away. Yes, but
break away from
what?
I asked myself. Behind me, Ioné; joint holder of
my leash . . . a leash that, on closer inspection, didn’t lead back
to her or Kallhander but to my family. I knew I could never turn completely
away from them—not as long as some chance existed that I could put them
properly to rest.

Then it’s about time I find out whether or not
that chance really exists, I told myself.

I turned on my CL as soon as we were on the down
escalator, contacted Kallhander, and looped in both Ioné and Enid. They both
seemed as surprised as Kallhander was when I spoke first without preamble.

“Kallhander,” I said, “either you give me whatever
it is you’ve got on file regarding my family—and you give it to me before I
hail a cab downstairs—or when I get in that cab, I’m not going back to the
hotel.”

Enid whipped around, her hair billowing outwards,
and stared at me. I wasn’t smiling, or frowning—I had the same cold,
locked-down look I’d given Ioné right before we’d walked out single file. I
think it scared her; she slowly broke eye contact and looked at the dance
studio across the way, slowly receding from sight (and, I guess, hope) like a
dying star.

Kallhander hadn’t answered. I went on.

“I have other options open to me now,” I said.
“Needless to say, they don’t involve you or the IPS, period. So you better make
me a seriously good offer in the next minute and change.”

“Options?” Kallhander said at last. “Meaning,
Angharad?”

“That’s one of them.” Why tell him the whole
story? I thought. Let him figure it out;
he’s
the detective.

“You’re free to take that risk, of course,” he
said. “Her diplomatic umbrella might well protect you from any direct action on
our part, if we chose to exercise it in the first place. But if I were to make
an educated guess about what you were planning to do, and what
she
was
planning to do—I wouldn’t count on her station continuing to provide the kind
of protection needed. Especially if she plans to trade some of her responsibilities,
and her privileges, for a wider latitude of opportunity.”

There were five whole seconds remaining before I
reached the bottom of the escalator. They were five of the longest, most
rage-blackened seconds of my life to that point.

There’s no way he could be talking about
that
,
I thought. Angharad hasn’t told anyone else about her plans—no, wait. Go back
and look at her exact words about . . .
Prelate Jainio
. What
had she said?
I think of him as someone to whom I can confide a great deal
and know that it will not be weaponized and used against me.
She never said
she’d
never told him,
only that he was “unsuited to support these ideas
of mine”. She must have talked to him about it, if only in the same veiled way
that Kallhander was talking about it now . . . and the reason
Kallhander’s using this kind of language is because he got to Jainio and the
poor slob spilled it all to them before we ever came planetside. They probably used
the same soft-touch approach on him, too:
I’m not expecting you to break any
oaths, but if there’s anything happening that could have implications for
cosmic security, I doubt anyone within the Achitraka would be able to protect
you from the consequences . . .
Cosmos knows, they might well
have started dropping cold little hints about his future family in that
conversation as well. Typical IPS. All smiles and handshakes, and then the
handshakes turn into nerve pinches and death-blows.

I stood at the bottom of the escalator and stared
at the door to the street. Out there, I could be in a cab in seconds. A short
walk, barely fifteen steps, if even that.
Come on, Enid, we’re going.
I
could feel the shapes of the words in my mouth, waiting to be spoken.

I shut my eyes for a quarter-second too long. In
the black there appeared an afterimage of my vantage point while riding down
the escalator—only now there wasn’t just one person (Enid) in front of me, but
two. And when they turned around . . . Biann and Yezmé. Unsmiling,
unmoving, but telling me with their eyes everything that needed to be said.
They were reminding me all the more how unlikely it was that I was ever going
to be able to turn my back on them.

“Mr. Sim,” Kallhander said, “let’s discuss this
face-to-face at the hotel.”

I opened my eyes and let in, then out, a long and
shaky breath. Kallhander had sounded, for once, about as worn-down as I did. He
may have done a better job hiding it than I might have, but it was easier for
me to pick up on it than I would have guessed.

Ioné, just then stepping off the escalator, paused
next to me and waited with her hands folded. Her little smile hadn’t gained or
lost a single erg of radiance. Enid looked like she wanted to be carried back
home. I was half-tempted to oblige.

It was full-blown nighttime now
—not
just because of the lack of natural light, but the chill air that cut around us
as we stepped out onto the street. Far down the way, between buildings, the
golden nimbus of the palace could still be seen. And there was suddenly that
much more traffic towards the building we’d just left—people on foot, taxis
opening up, folks crossing over through the skybridge from the opposite blocks.
Sounded like word had gotten out about Cioran and everyone was flocking to get
a glimpse or an autograph or maybe a fistful of hair. None of them took any
notice of us.

Enid looked mildly less irritated by the time we
sank into the cab’s cushions; she looked like she only wanted to cuss me out
and not bite chunks out of my ass.

“You were really something up on stage back there,
though,” I said.

“Thanks.” She didn’t sound elated. Dammit, I
thought, I probably just reminded her of what she’d lost. Good going.

“Is that the kind of thing you want to do?” I
said, trying to salve whatever wound I’d opened up. “Just you and an audience,
or just you and a—”

“It’s—
close
to that.” She didn’t sound
embittered—more like she was simply having trouble picking the right word. “It
wasn’t that when I was with the circus I hated being upstaged or something like
that. It was just always
their
material,
their
show,
their
spectacle,
end to end, and I was just one piece of that. Every time I came up with
something of my own, they were like ‘Sure, fine,’ but in the end it was always
their thing first.”

“So what if you do something like this and then you
say, ‘Damn, I’m lonely’?”

“Well, how else am I gonna find out if that’ll
happen? —Oh,
man
. Henré, you have no
idea
how much I wanted to
hang out with him!”

“That’s two of us.”

 The first thing I said on walking back into the
hotel was, I hoped, not what Kallhander had been expecting to hear: “Did you
have your tentacles into Jainio this whole time?”

I got him to flinch when I said it. It was a small
flinch, but there it was all the same—which was more than I expected to pry out
of the likes of him. He’d been sitting at the low table in the common area,
with his back to the door—something that only was a problem in places where you
didn’t have CL. Here, all he had to do was patch passively into the sensory
surfaces all around to see whatever was happening behind him.

“Well?” I turned my hands out at him.

“He was a good deal more pliant than we expected
him to be.” Kallhander’s voice was small, but it rose as he spoke, like he was
getting up the nerve to sound proud of what he’d done. “We insisted that he did
not have to reveal anything that was trusted to him in confidence. But we did
make it clear that anything we knew about the Kathaya’s plans through him would
make it all the easier to provide the needed protection for her.”

“Oh, so you were doing them a
favor
. How nice
of you.”

“It’s been our experience that some people
entrusted with political power are often naïve as to all of its possible
applications or repercussions. They may be deeply principled people, but they
don’t understand how their principles can be used against them. The Kathaya
placed a great deal of trust in Prelate Jainio—”

“Which you then exploited.”

“—which he also realized could have been just as
easily exploited by someone who was not IPS, not Achitraka, and not an ally by
any meaning of the word. Bear in mind, he had all the more reason to be worried
given that he was about to add a new member to his family.”

Kallhander put down his fork. I’d been so focused
on his face, I only then noticed he had a mostly-empty plate in front of him.
First meal in how long? I wondered. Not like he needed one as regularly as the
rest of us—and not like he would have much to complain about if I’d soured it
on him.

“What’d you threaten him with?” I said. “Come on,
he may have been a soft egg; even I could see that. But most people don’t just
roll over when you poke them.”

“There wasn’t any overt coercion on our part.”

“No, no
overt
coercion, I’m sure.”

“Henré, to be honest about it—
he
was the
one who came to
us
.” Kallhander pointed at his breastbone. “During our
initial conversations he very much had the attitude of someone who was holding
a great deal back. We were prepared to dismiss him, but he sat back down and
said, ‘There’s something else I don’t feel comfortable not telling you.’ That
was how we learned of it.”

“Then the least you could do,” I said, seating
myself across from him, “is tell me what you gleaned from him. So we can
compare notes, like good little co-investigators, you know?”

Enid raised one leg, tumbled herself over the back
of the couch and landed on it next to me, legs folded under her. I couldn’t
decide if she was angry or tired. Probably some unholy mixture of both.

“The Prelate described the bare outlines of a plan
which, from all he had been able to discern, was not even fully formed in the
Kathaya’s own mind.” Kallhander wiped at his mouth. “She spoke of a possible
schism within the Old Way. It takes very little effort on anyone’s part to see
how politically volcanic and destabilizing such a thing would be. To be frank,
I feel that telling you two is by itself dangerous enough.”

“Nothing we don’t already know.” Enid sounded as
sulky as she looked. “That’s what that whole conversation with her was about.”

“I’d intuited that. She made some offer of
employment for you—perhaps as a full-time diplomatic liaison?”

What’s a few more beans spilled at this point? I
thought. “That and her chauffeur,” I said. “For lack of a more refined way to
put it.”

“You plan on taking her up on that offer, then?”

“Unless you actually give me what I came here for,
I’ve got no reason to turn down something of that scope.”

“I still feel obliged to reiterate something.”

I nodded, let him continue.

“If the Kathaya attempts to split the Old Way,
there is no guarantee anyone will continue to honor her in that capacity. Many
worlds may continue to do so at first, especially since much of the current
fidelity to the Old Way revolves around the Kathaya’s cult of personality at
least as much as it does the structure of the Old Way itself.”

“That’s been plain for a while now.”

“It’s the side effects, the fallout, that are
going to be especially difficult to predict. Two events in particular stand to
be grossly affected by this. One is the renegotiation of the Kathayagara lease.
The other is the upcoming summit meeting to discuss the Old Way emigration
issue. Both are likely to be all the more difficult for her to participate in
if she no longer has the support of her own organization. On hearing all this,
are you surprised we were concerned, and that we were motivated to learn what
we could?”

I couldn’t argue with that and wasn’t about to.

He went on: “The IPS is always in a ticklish
position. By not acting on such information, we might well be endangering the
welfare of our member states. By acting on it, we risk triggering other kinds
of social unrest that can be just as damaging. We choose to opt for the latter,
since there is a slightly wider latitude of prediction options available for
it.”

By
prediction
he meant
management.
But
again, I wasn’t in the mood for what would amount to verbal thumb-wrestling.

“You’re not going to stop her, are you,” I said.

“I doubt we could if we wanted to. But if what’s
being proposed is true, we are, to put it mildly, concerned for her safety.”

“You don’t trust us?”

“I trust
you
.” He said I, I thought. Not
we.
“What I admit I have a great deal less faith in is your ability to protect
her from others who might know what we know and not be quite so scrupulous
about it.”

Enid laughed, saving me the trouble. Nice and
bitter, too, just the way I would have done it. “You don’t think she’s capable
of hiring the right protection? She’s the
Kathaya
. You’ve got a
seriously low opinion of anyone who’s not you, anyone ever tell you that?”

“If she is likely to add third-party defenses to
her entourage,” Kallhander said, “which I believe she will, then she will have
relatively few choices. She may choose to take members of the Kathayagara Honor
Guard with her, for instance—such as her former Honor Guardsmen Mimu and Wani.”

He didn’t stress the word
former.
The word
did the job all by itself.

“The Honor Guard are not incorruptible, either,”
he went on. “They are loyal, disciplined, well-trained, and show no hesitation
at giving up their lives for her. What they do not have, by and large, is the
training, motivation or impetus to initiate countermeasures against enemies.
Her splinter group will most likely be very small, and thus very vulnerable to
attack and subversion. If she is to have an honor guard, at least some of it
should consist of counteroffensive and counterintelligence personnel.”

“Like Enid said,” I said. “She can get that
any-damn-where.”

“We are offering to save her the trouble,” Ioné
said, standing right behind me when she said it for maximum heart-stopping
effect.

“And now that we know you’ve been offered a place
of some kind in her new entourage,” Kallhander picked up, “we want to extend
the protection of IPS to her as a pre-emptive gesture of goodwill.”

It took me seconds on end to say something. “Have
you talked about this with the people upstairs from you? More like, how’d you
keep their heads from spontaneously combusting?”

“They do know. It’s been difficult to keep it
compartmentalized, but we managed. They allowed us to make this offer through
you.”

“Just so you know—I hate your boss, whoever he
is,” I said. “I hope I never meet him, because I’m going to start by insulting
his tie and working my way down from there.” There was no way I was having the
rest of this conversation without a drink; I pushed myself off the sofa and
extruded the mini-bar from the wall. I was tempted to slam doors and call it a
night, but I knew all I’d do was chafe until the sun came up. Cavafy’s words
came back to mind:
Confront, confront; why show them a back they only want
to slip their knives into anyway?

“So, let me get this straight,” Enid said. “You
want us to go to Angharad and say something like, ‘Look, how do you plan to
keep yourself safe for this job? Oh, wait, I’ve got
just
the
person—people—for this job.’ Oh, no, that’s so not going to look suspicious at
all
.”
Sometime when I hadn’t been looking, she’d turned around in her seat and hung
her legs over the back of the couch. Telling her to take her feet of the
furniture was clearly a losing proposition.

“It doesn’t have to be us specifically,”
Kallhander said. “Any available IPS team member could be assigned to this
mission. On the whole, though, I believe we, Ioné and I, have the immediate
advantage of being familiar with both the situation and the people involved.”

I undid the seal on the bottle of Benimaru—a
blended whiskey I’d heard could put chest hair on a houseplant—and splashed a
little into the bottom of the glass for starters. My own words about how any
one IPS officer would be worth any dozen or more of the Kathaya’s honor guard
were back to haunt me. And they didn’t just want one officer, but two, which
was about the level of protection someone of Angharad’s station deserved.

“I can’t even believe you’re asking me to do
this,” I told the glass, right before I tossed the drink into my mouth and let
it burn there for a moment. “No. I do believe it; it just turns my stomach. All
you’ve done as far as we’re concerned is dangle bait over our heads and string
us along. What makes you think I’m going to suggest you for a job like that?”

“For precisely those reasons.”

I could have laughed. Cosm take it; I decided to
anyway, after watering my throat with another shot.

“You know firsthand,” Kallhander said, “that we
take our work seriously—”

I started giving him the full-strength venom. “The
only reason you
have
anything at all is because you got lucky.
Twice
.
No, three—
four
times. You got lucky with me falling into your lap,
and
being dumb enough to let myself get jerked around by you,
and
you got
lucky with the Prelate turning out to have a guilty conscience
and
be a
terminal worrywart because he’s got a tadpole on the way!” The Benimaru didn’t
even feel like it was hitting my stomach; it felt like it was going straight
into my head through the insides of my cheeks and the back of my throat. “I’m
not recommending you for a post like that.
Especially
if it means I have
to wake up to your smile every morning.” One more shot, I told myself, and then
I’m getting some rest, and in the morning I’m heading back over to Angharad’s
house.

“Have you looked at the file I provided you with
yet?” Kallhander said.

I was about to say something—maybe
No, and stop
changing the subject. I was talking about what a jerk you are, not how
brilliant I am.
I paused just long enough to toggle open the file he’d sent
me (I’d received it on the ride home without even thinking about it) and peer
at it.

Like my half-second-too-long pause at the foot of
the escalator, sometimes that much of a pause is all it takes to make you
rethink everything.

This was unquestionably a sample of the same kind
that had been scraped up in the previous accidents. It was much smaller—almost
an order of magnitude so—than those samples. But there was something else about
it that seemed immediately clear: if whatever these pieces were had any kind of
core node, this was it. One of its interfaces matched the inbound interface on
the PRN voltage control system—or, rather, what the inbound interface to same
ought to look like if I was going to design one that matched the rest of these
bits and pieces. It took less than a thousand cycles of the simulation to show
the PRN and the core talking to each other, to show the traffic spreading
between all the cells in the rest of the simulation . . . and to show
the cells forming themselves into a single, closed-ended surface. I had to add
orders of magnitude more surface area to get the ends of the surface to
meet—enough to create something about two meters on an end and roughly ovoid.